Focus Areas

Focus analysis measures whether a contributor is a specialist (deeply focused on one area) or a generalist (spread across many areas). Neither is inherently better — the value depends on team needs and project phase.

How Focus Is Calculated

1. Collect all areas_affected from a contributor's commits in the date range
2. Count the frequency of each area
3. Identify the top area (most frequently touched)
4. Calculate focus percentage:

$$\text{focus\_percent}=\frac{\text{commits touching top area}}{\text{total commits}}\times 100$$

Metrics

Metric	Description
top_area	The area the contributor works in most
focus_percent	Percentage of commits in the top area
area_distribution	Full histogram of area frequencies

Interpreting Focus

Focus %	Profile	Description
> 70%	Specialist	Deep expertise in one area; risk of bus factor
40–70%	Balanced	Primary area with meaningful secondary contributions
< 30%	Generalist	Spread across many areas; breadth over depth

Use Cases

Team Planning

• If everyone is a specialist, you have high bus factor risk
• If everyone is a generalist, you may lack deep expertise in critical areas
• A healthy team has a mix

Career Development

• Focus shifting from generalist to specialist might indicate the developer is finding their niche
• Focus spreading might indicate growing into a tech lead or architect role

Sprint Review

• Unexpected focus changes might signal unplanned work or firefighting
• A developer suddenly working outside their focus area could be covering for someone

TIP

Focus areas come from the areas_affected field in commit analysis. The LLM identifies these based on the actual code changes and project structure, not just file paths.