Benefit-weight ratio (WSJF in SAFe) visualization

Problem

• Many tools have a way to help you make decisions on what feature to work on next. Where next to put your effort and investment in. GitLab currently doesn't make this easy, especially when in comes to tradeoffs.
• Often, when making a decision on what feature to work on, you want to balance amount of effort required (which impacts "resources" (i.e. time, people, infrastructure, etc.) and business impact.
• In GitLab, we don't have any way to track impact for a given scope of work.
• We have issue weight to track effort required per issue.
• Note that "priority" should be an output of these processes. And in GitLab, we do have a way to track priority, namely through ordered lists in boards and epics, and priority labels.

Design

• For each epic, we have a way to track weight. This can be through summed weights, i.e. https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/5163.
• We also have a new field per epic, to track benefit. This field will allow you to quantify business impact.
• And then GitLab will calculate the ratio of impact to weight per epic. So this measures the "bang-for-buck" for an epic.
• https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/8186 explains how this also satisfies WSJF in SAFe.
• This is further shown in a pretty visualization.
• In the below, you see epics filtered to the ones you care about, and it shows the tradeoff in a color gradient visualization. Essentially, any visualization that indicates tradeoff would work. You can also mouse over the epics to see more information.
• In https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-ee/issues/8186 you can make a decision per the SAFe methodology. In this feature, you can see the tradeoffs you are making.

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