Dev Days by Repository
Dev Days by Repository tracks the total development effort, measured via dev days, spent within each code repository. It provides insight into where engineering capacity is concentrated and can reveal imbalances or overlooked projects.
Calculation
Development effort is attributed to repositories using minware's dev day time model, which maps code activity such as commits and ticket links to specific repositories. This shows both coding activity and metadata-based associations tied to repositories ownership.
The metric is calculated as:
dev days by repository = sum of dev days linked to each repository in the reporting period
Goals
Dev Days by Repository helps teams answer key operational questions, including:
- Which codebases are absorbing the most engineering attention?
- Are small repositories receiving disproportionate effort compared to strategic systems?
- Is workload distribution across services, applications, or modules balanced?
This metric supports prioritization of maintenance, refactoring, or resource alignment across technical domains.
Variations
Teams typically analyze this metric:
- By team or squad, to understand code ownership and focus
- By repository type, such as microservices, SDKs, or shared utilities
- Over time, to detect surges or declines in attention across codebases
- Relative to commit or PR volume, to check if engagement matches activity
Some organizations also normalize dev days per repository by team size or support tickets to assess effort impact.
Limitations
Dev Days by Repository shows where effort goes but not why. High activity could signal healthy maintenance or problematic instability. It also relies on correct commit attribution and repository tagging.
To interpret this metric effectively, pair it with:
| Complementary Metric | Why It’s Relevant |
|---|---|
| Work in Progress (WIP) | Highlights whether high dev-day repos suffer from multitasking or concurrency |
| Deployment Frequency | Shows if repositories receiving dev attention are delivering changes often |
| Dev Days by Epic | Reveals whether repository work aligns with strategic initiatives |
Optimization
To improve insights and balance across repositories:
- Monitor repo effort consistently. Visualize dev days weekly or monthly to spot trends or anomalies.
- Balance team focus. Prevent over-concentration on non-critical services, use roadmap alignment and WIP Limits to distribute workload.
- Investigate effort spikes. Sudden increases may indicate technical debt, outages, or unsupported dependencies.
- Reallocate or refactor aging codebases. High dev-day investment in legacy repos may merit consolidation, cleanup, or dedicated ownership.
- Invest in shared libraries or frameworks when several teams show overlap in low-level work, standardizing can reduce duplicate effort.
Dev Days by Repository helps organizations connect actual engineering time to ownership boundaries and technical investment dynamics. When paired with deployment and WIP data, it becomes a powerful tool for architectural stewardship and team capacity planning.
