The Feature Effort is the System Effort spent on implementing new functionality.  Adding features is considered to be the main purpose of developing software.

Feature Effort % is a DETANGLE® Performance Indicator and measures the Feature Effort percentage of the System Effort. It complements the Maintenance Effort performance indicator.

What does an ideal percentage of Primary Effort with respect to System Effort look like? Similar to our recommendations on Maintenance Effort we suggest the following complementary guidelines:

• The optimal percentage share of the System Effort on implementing new features is around 80%.
• Your Feature Effort % should lie at least above 60%.
• You need to worry in case the Feature Effort % is less than 40% over more than two iterations. Especially when not using the remaining effort to reduce technical debt. Otherwise technical debt accumulates and new features get more and more postponed. Which in turn endangers the release of new innovations and their time-to-market.

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

• 👎 less than 40% of the system effort has been spent on the primary development of primary category issues in the last time period.
• ⚠️ less than 60% (but more than 40%) of the system development effort has been spent as primary development effort in the last time period.
• 👍 more than 60% of system effort is spent on feature development

Feature Effort % 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.