How does Rally calcuate Full-Time Equivalent

[Anon Anon]

I found Rally neither calucate the full-time equivalent with the number of team members, nor team capacity via track-team status.
Does anyone know how exactually the full time equivalent calucate?

This explaination from help doesn't work for me.

Full-time equivalent
Full-time equivalent (FTE) is a measurement of team size that considers contributions from all contributors to the team. For example, three full-time team members are working on a project with two part-time members (who devote 50% of their time to the project), then the full-time equivalent is four team members.
 

[Legacy User]

You're correct, Rally does not calculate anything based on FTEs, I presume that the definition in Help is provided just as a general reference, not to indicate how the application works. Total Capacity for an iteration on Track >> Team Status is simply the sum of whatever you explicitly entered for individual capacities for the team members.

As a scrum master I don't want the system making assumptions about my capacity based on FTEs because I don't plan to 100% of individual capacity. By using the methods that Rally provides I plan each iteration separately and if a team member is working 10 days during the iteration then I plan to 80% of that person's capacity and enter 64 hours of capacity for her. This way if I know that John is on vacation for three out of the 10 days in my sprint then I can set his capacity to 45 hours instead of 64 and have a more accurate reflection of my team's capacity for the sprint.

[Anon Anon]

Eric,
Thanks very much for your reply. I didn't make it clear in my question.
I am trying to understand the FTE calucation for the defect density calucation in the Insights->Quality.  It isin't for capacity planning purpose.
 

[Legacy User]

Apologies Wei Chen, I misunderstood your question and should have asked for clarification. I got a better sense of how this worked by looking at the Insights slide-out drawer for Dimensions>> Full Time Equivalent. In Insights the FTE calculations are based on the distribution of transactions (which per help "is determined through a heuristic which evaluates user actions in Rally") across projects for users who contributed to the project being analyzed. If you view either Quality or Dimensions by month, expand the drilldown and click the Project FTE button in the upper right part of the drilldown then you can see the actual formulae as shown below:



In essence, all of the transactions that I do in Rally in a given workspace make me equal to 1.00 FTE for that workspace. Let's say for simplicity that my work is split between two projects in my workspace and that I had 184 total transactions during April 2016, 126 in Project A and 58 in Project B. If I scope Insights to Project B then the calculation for how many FTEs I represented in the project would be something like 58/184 = .31 FTE. Total FTE is simply the sum of this calculation for every user who contributed work to the project. 

The heuristic for determining the number of transactions per user is opaque but this makes pretty good fundamental sense to me, and learning about it made for a good early-morning research project. Hope that's more helpful and thanks for getting me to think about it!

[Niveditha (Nivi) Gadamchetty]

Hi Eric,

 

Do you know how the list of people is being populated here? (in the screenshot you posted).

I have a team member contributing to a certain project, but doesn't show up in the FTE list. Do you know why this could be?

 

Regards,

Nivi

[Larry Zhang]

can you answer a similar questions here:
https://community.broadcom.com/enterprisesoftware/communities/community-home/digestviewer/viewthread?MessageKey=d363b175-24f4-4721-aacc-f7972b4b0ec8&CommunityKey=f303f769-8d4c-44d9-924c-3845bba6444e&tab=digestviewer&SuccessMsg=Thank%20you%20for%20submitting%20your%20message.