The Bus Factor Balances (BFB) metric is a DETANGLE® Team Collaboration metric based on issues selected by the “Features” filter.

This filter is normally used to select the issue types which capture the functionality (e.g. user stories or features) as “functional” issues of your system in your issue tracker.

Bus Factor Balances reflects the number of contributors working in teams-of-two when implementing “Features”.  This working style is considered as the most effective one with respect to knowledge sharing (more on this in our blog post). The code modules behind make up knowledge balances.

In addition, the effort of these contributors has to be highly above the effort average of all contributors working on knowledge balance code modules.

Losing such contributors poses a risk since they are contributors the whole team knowledge building process relies on. The higher the number the better, since a high number indicates:

• An even distribution of knowledge balances across contributors and several contributors of high knowledge sharing
• An even split of work effort across all contributors  when sharing knowledge for implementing primary issues.

The Bus Factor Balances % metric measures the percentage of Bus Factor Islands contributors compared to the total number of contributors working on “Features”.

Therefore,  icons in the DETANGLE® diagrams on BFB are used for the following to thresholds:

• 👎 less than 20% of all contributors count up to the current BFB value in the last time period.
• ⚠️more than 20% but less than 40% of all contributors count up to the current BFB in the last time period.
• 👍 more  than 40% of all contributors count up to the current BFB value in the last time period.

BFB is calculated along the code structure of the code base, for files, folders, the whole system and for each time period:

Take a look at DETANGLE® Metrics at a Glance for an overview of all metrics.