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.
