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Workload, measured against the days someone actually works

A task workspace inside the main platform — a 37,000-line domain with two engineers ahead of me in it.

The problem
Leads assigned work by counting open tasks, which ignores that some people work fewer days than others.
What I built
A workload report measured against each member’s working days, project membership, and a guard against cancelling tasks other work depends on.
The result
Landed across 59 files in a domain two other engineers own. On the staging branch, not in production yet.

Third-largest contributor to the domain — 6,786 of 37,327 lines, about 18%. One feature landed across 59 files and 4,899 lines. On the staging branch, not in production yet.

Assigning work fairly needs an answer to "who is already full", and a count of open tasks is not that answer. Someone working three days a week with four tasks is in more trouble than someone working five days with six.

I built the workload report to measure assigned work against each member's configured working days, so a lead sees capacity rather than volume before they assign anything. Alongside it: project membership, so a project has its own member list rather than inheriting the whole workspace, and a cancellation guard that stops a task being cancelled out from under work that depends on it.

Most of the effort here was not the feature. It was landing 59 files inside a domain two other engineers wrote, without breaking what they had built — which meant reading a great deal more code than I changed, and writing feature tests for the notification, status-transition and permission paths that my changes touched.

Screens

  • My work: ten open tasks where the user is an assignee, grouped into Overdue and No Date, with status, assignees, priority, start, due date and estimate columns. Overdue tasks show how many days late they are.
    My work, on demo data — the view a lead’s assignment decisions end up in. The screens are colleagues’ front end; my part is the backend behind capacity, membership and cancellation.
  • My work filtered to closed tasks and grouped by project, with Done and Cancelled statuses across four demo projects.
    Closed work by project. Cancelled is its own outcome, and cancelling goes through the guard: a task other work depends on cannot be cancelled out from under it.
  • Task inbox with two unread "Task Updated" notifications for demo tasks, and Unread, All and Archived filters.
    The inbox. I wrote the feature tests that pin where each notification link lands, so a notification always opens the task it is about.

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