SEV Saturation Visualizer

Background

A SEV refers to an unexpected incident or occurrence that can impact projects or features across a company, affecting usability or safety for customers. These events can range from minor disruptions (SEV4) to major accidents (SEV1) or emergencies (SEV0), often requiring immediate attention and action to mitigate any negative effects.

Managing ongoing SEVs incurs an engineering maintenance cost on a team. This visualizer is designed to help capture this cost. The measure, SEV Saturation Index (SSI), is a metric intended to capture the maintenance burden that an engineering team faces in responding to SEVs over a period of time.

The SEV Saturation Index, or SSI, is defined as follows:

Mileage will vary on a team-by-team basis, but the scaling is such that 0 represents no SEV saturation, and 1.0 would represent "Full" Saturation. Note that there is technically no maximum value for the metric, so supersaturation is possible.

Notes: There are multiple options for `sev_start` and `sev_end`. Since we are interested in capturing the maintenance burden of SEVs, the recommendation for `sev_start` is biased toward using the time the SEV was created rather than when the incident started, and similarly for `sev_end`, bias is toward using a resolved or mitigated date.

User Guide

To use the visualizer simply add SEVs, adjust team sizes, and continue to iterate and explore saturation levels after iterative tinkering. You can also sort and delete SEVs from the table below.

Step 2: Adjust Team size

Clear SEVs

Table of SEVs