A Simple and Quantitative Metric for Task Prioritization
Published: 2024-03-25 15:39:55

In the software development process and management, we do a lot of things that can be less or more expensive to do, and with more or less impact in the product and development lifecycle.

The best we can do is find the less expensive stuff that brings the most valuable impact to our users and development lifecycle.

I'm proposing here a way to prioritize the things we are doing in our projects to give to the end users and our team mates, the most cost-effective software delivering process in order to have more success in our products and developing process. Users happiness is important, but without happy devs, hard to have happy users.

I believe we should first focus on the refactors (and another task types) that best balance four key factors:


- The time they will take
- Their positive impact on our development process (mainly in terms of speeding up feature development, bug fixing, or maintenance)
- Their positive impact on end-users (in terms of UX or issue resolution)
- Their contribution to improving our app's performance (like reducing database connections, speeding up web asset loading, lowering memory usage, etc.)

## Suggested Metric:

 
For each proposed task, we can assign a score from _**1 to 10**_ based on these four factors. Then, we simply add up these numbers to determine the task's priority.

**Task Time**: Estimate the time needed to complete the refactoring. Consider the complexity, the need for extensive testing, and if it requires changes in multiple system parts.

1-2: More than a month.

3-4: Three weeks to a month.

5-6: Two to three weeks.

7-8: One to two weeks.

9-10: Less than a week.

**Performance Improvement Contribution**: Gauge the refactoring task's potential to boost system efficiency.

1-2: Negligible improvement.

3-4: Minor improvement.

5-6: Moderate improvement.

7-8: Significant improvement.

9-10: Major improvement.

**Ease of Maintenance Contribution**: Assess how the refactoring will ease future code maintenance.

1-2: Barely any impact.

3-4: Slightly useful.

5-6: Fairly useful.

7-8: Highly useful.

9-10: Incredibly useful.

**End-User Impact**: Consider the refactoring's effect on user experience, such as UI/UX enhancements, faster performance, or fewer errors.

1-2: Unnoticeable to users.

3-4: Minor improvement noticed by a few.

5-6: Moderate improvement noticed by many.

7-8: Significant improvement greatly enhancing user experience.

9-10: Complete transformation of user experience.

_**Optionally**_, we can assign an importance level to each factor (at times, end-user impact might be more crucial, while at other times, ease of maintenance might take precedence). This importance could range from _**1 to 2**_.

## Example:

**Task**: Remove unused code in React app

**Scores**:

Task Time: 9

Performance Improvement Contribution: 8

Ease of Maintenance Contribution: 6

End-User Impact: 8

Priority: 9 + 8 + 6 + 8 = 31

If all factors have an importance of 1 but Ease of Maintenance Contribution has 2, the new priority would be:

Priority: 9 + 8 + (6 * 2) + 8 = 37

_After we have this number for every task we need to do, we can simply order the tasks based on this number to have the priorities ordered._

I think this is a simple, non-bureaucratic metric for accurately prioritizing tasks (Sometimes we want to know what is the most important thing to deal with using some empirical technique to calculate priorities, but sometimes they are difficult to apply or are not exactly we need). Leaders can do this alone or all in the teams developers who have a more comprehensive and complete knowledge about the apps you're developing.