Rework

WHY IT MATTERS

Rework measures the amount of time spent on fixing defects. High rework rates can indicate quality problems or inefficient processes.

HOW IT’S MEASURED

Development work is categorized into four types: features, churn, refactor, and other. 

Rework includes churn and refactor — a proxy for time spent fixing short-term and long-term defects in the codebase.

Rework = % churned code + % refactored code

While a balance of churn and refactor is needed to maintain and improve quality, teams should optimize for shipping more features on a sustained, long-term basis.

To get your team’s overall work breakdown, we take the average work breakdown across all pull requests and then multiply by the number of pull requests merged. For example, features = pull requests × percentage new code.