The DETANGLE® System Effort is a fundamental metric and captures the effort spent on the whole development of the system. It is measured by taking a weighted sum of added, modified and deleted lines of code. Thus, the unit considered is cLOC – changed Lines Of Code.

The System Effort is calculated along the code structure of the code base, for files, folders, the whole system and for each time period.

The DETANGLE® frontend boards come with two main filters:

• The Primary Issue Category is intended for the selection of issue types which capture the functionality (e.g. user stories or features) of your system as “functional” issues in your issue tracker.
• The Defect Issue Category allows selecting issue types capturing the maintenance issues in an issue tracker. These are normally bugs.
• You can take any of these categories to select another set of issue types in order to investigate the effort spent on these tickets. For example, it makes sense to look at the effort of technical improvements (i.e. refactorings or redesigns) to reduce technical debt in case of using a dedicated issue type for this kind of work.

This distinction into categories adds another dimension how to partition the System Effort by leveraging commit-to-issue associations and issue types:

• Primary Effort represents the part of the System Effort for developing new functionality. It is the effort spent on issues selected in the “Primary Issue Category”.
• Maintenance Effort is the share of the System Effort spent on fixing bugs. It is the effort spent on issues selected in the “Defect Issue Category”.

The following table gives an overview of the different types of effort and their measurement granularity with the above filters being used in the most common way:

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