Le 30/10/2015 20:39, Kevin Smith a écrit :
There is an initiative within the WMF to figure out
how much time/effort
teams spend on "new functionality" vs. "maintenance". As a pilot
project, I have been tracking that in our Discovery Cirrus project[1]
for a couple months.
As shown on this graph[2], we have been spending somewhere between 25%
and 50% of our time on "maintenance". Note that this should not be
considered at all scientific. For starters, there are several glaring
issues with this graph:
* Because we are not doing point estimation, this graph is based on
task counts, not actual effort.
* Data around Oct 1 is missing/funky due to the offsite.
* The bars are pure percentages, so 50% of 2 tasks completed would
look the same as 50% of 40 tasks completed. That 100% bar, in
particular, is misleading because I believe it is based on a single
task being resolved that week.
* The counts are based on my snap decision for each task, whether to
add the #worktype-new-functionality or the #worktype-maintenance tag.
Still, it's a higher fraction than I would have guessed.
Is it worth my time (or someone else's) to continue to track this data?
[1]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/search-and-discovery-cirrus-sprint/
[2]
http://phlogiston.wmflabs.org/discir_maint_count_frac.png
Hello,
For Release Engineering, Greg Grossmeier came up with a spreadsheet that
lists as columns:
- our key projects (features
- maintenance
- non sense
And rows are the team members.
We each fill a percentage in each column (total 100%) and at the bottom
we have a sum of team overall time per project. Something like:
| Scap3 | CI | Maint. | Non sense |
---------------------------------------------
Antoine | 0% | 50% | 40% | 10% |
John Doe | 90% | 5% | 0% | 0% |
---------------------------------------------
Total: | 90% | 55% | 40% | 10% | <-- max 200%
Average: | 45% | 27% | 20% | 5% | <-- average
---------------------------------------------
That is done at the beginning of our weekly meeting and only takes a
dozen of seconds.
The main advantages are:
* easy to get the data
* fast to fill and actually fun since the spreadsheet is shared and show
activity of others
* time based
Cons:
* inaccurate, but as you said unless we keep track of what we do every
15 minutes...
* biased by human perception / not based on any fact
* a week-end passed
I still think it provides useful value. After all if a team perceives it
is spending lot of time on maintenance, that would explain why members
bitch about not being able to produce features.
Or if you get a ton of outages and issues filled but none of the team
members doing Maintenance, that would help refocus the team as well.
Organization wide, I believe all the inaccuracies offset each other and
the aggregate would probably ends up being accurate.
At another place, we filled a rough estimate of time spent whenever
commenting on a task. At the end we could roughly estimate how much
time got spent and given the category/tags that could be aggregated.
--
Antoine "hashar" Musso
