How we calculate time saved by Unblocked in the Analytics Dashboard

December 12, 2024

Unblocked’s Analytics Dashboard helps you understand how your team uses Unblocked and what impact is being delivered as a result. In particular, one chart shows you the time your team saved by getting answers from Unblocked.

This blog post aims to give you more confidence in the “time savings numbers” reported for your team.

Establishing the time wasted looking for answers

Before developers can write code, they need to gain sufficient context to understand exactly what problem they need to solve and why.

Unfortunately, this first step in the software development process is full of challenges. Information is scattered across dozens of tools and critical context is often lost to turnover, so developers are often forced to spend hours, if not days, searching for the answers they need, or worse interrupting their peers for help.

All this time adds up to hours wasted before more focused work (like writing code) can even begin.

We know this reality to be true from experience, but it’s difficult (if not impossible?) to accurately pinpoint the exact number of minutes wasted in the “context gathering” process.

In fact, many studies have been conducted to measure developer productivity and the reported “time wasted” is all over the map:

Developers spend 58% of their time comprehending their code. - IEEE
Developers spend more than 30 minutes a day searching for information. - The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024
Developers spend more than 30 minutes a day answering questions. -The Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2024
It takes an average of 25 minutes to regain focus after an interruption. - WorkJoy
People interrupt at least 2 colleagues to find what they need, up to 5 times a day. - Qatalog
Context-switching hinders deep work and reduces productivity by up to 40%. - UC Irvine and Vanderbilt University

Estimating the time saved by Unblocked

Given the variability and discrepancies in the research for this topic, we defined a number that is both informed by the research, our own personal experience and stands up to “the sniff test”.

We estimated that a typical question can take up to 10 minutes to answer. Sometimes you get to the answer faster, sometimes longer.. But communicating the question, discussion and explaining answers and regaining focus feels like a 10 minute task.

Of course, there are *at least* two people in a conversation, so we (conservatively) estimate that Unblocked helps you recover ~20 minutes per question.

Thoughts? Let us know!

For more information on Analytics, including other data points you can review, see our blog post or documentation.

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