Work Focus Breakdown

The distribution of a team's focus is crucial because this indicates if the development team is aligned with the company strategy.

This analysis categorizes work into four parts to reflect a better understanding of the code progress;

New Work 

New work reflects new codes that were placed without replacing any existing code parts. 

Especially in the newly established solutions or adding new features the new work ratio should be high. Therefore this can be evaluated as a sign of progress in the code base.

Legacy Factor

In the development life cycle, while improving the solutions with new features, existing code parts should be maintained and kept up to date. The effort development teams put into this process can be identified as Legacy Factor. 

This metric is an important one because all focus should not shift to this process so the percentage of work for the legacy factor should be monitored constantly and the effort should be planned carefully.

Help Others

This metric is an indication of writing a code that replaces the code that has been added by someone else in the last 3 weeks.

The team leads who are still part of the development process or experienced developers mostly fall into this category. They would be familiar with the code base and guide other developers for the better.

Churn

Rewriting or removing the code has been written in the last 3 weeks by the same developer. 

While less than 15% of the churn ratio can be acceptable because mistakes happen in the development process. 

On the other hand, monitoring the churn rate closely for any unexpected increases can help identify any possible issues related to the team members before it has a significant impact on the team and project. 

These increases in churn may indicate a problem with the developer such as being stuck or with the production process such as failing to define issue objectives clearly.

Churn Calculation

Churn is calculated by checking the 4 lines before and after the changed code area. 

If this continuous code chunk contains code parts that changed previously, the algorithm marks them as churn. The issued code area can have updated, removed, unchanged code parts.  

On the other hand, the newly added code parts in the evaluated code chunk are marked as new work.