Better effort tracking for development-adjacent work

Your engineering team does more than just write code. Bug investigations, planning sessions, testing, and other development-adjacent work are crucial parts of the software development process, but they often go untracked because they don’t generate Git activity.

We’ve now introduced a new event type called issue progress days to our effort model, making it possible to assign effort to work that isn’t associated with Git activity. This means Swarmia can now capture a more complete picture of where your team’s time is spent.

How it works

Once an issue is assigned to someone and set to in progress, Swarmia starts counting that as daily activity for as long as the issue remains in progress. This new activity type gets included in our effort calculations alongside Git commits, comments, and pull requests.

The change is particularly valuable for allocating effort to tasks like:

• Bug investigation and troubleshooting
• Project planning and research
• Manual testing and quality assurance
• Security audits and compliance work

What you’ll see

For most developers, the impact won’t be dramatic. For contributors who handle significant amounts of code-adjacent work, you’ll notice more accurate effort allocation. You may see the biggest changes when drilling into specific issues that previously showed no effort or very little effort, such as quality assurance and security tasks.

The model change is visible in every view that uses effort (FTE), including investment balance and software capitalization. This gives you a more complete view of how your team’s time is distributed across different types of work.

If you’d like to generate capitalization data using the previous model for any reason, please reach out to us.