[teampractices] FYI: Discovery time spent on maintenance

[Kevin Smith]

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

Kevin Smith
Agile Coach, Wikimedia Foundation
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