Allow bucket allocation limits to be fixed in absolute terms

[amdw]

Currently, bucket resource allocation limits are set in percentages. The user sets a percentage on each bucket in a period, and they go red if the bucket percentages add up to more than 100%.

There are situations where a user might want to fix the limit for a bucket in absolute terms: for example, if the team has promised to devote exactly n headcount to a particular area during the period. The user might then want the team's remaining resources to be spread among the other buckets.

I propose a toggle on the bucket allowing the user to specify whether the bucket's allocation limit is fixed in absolute or percentage terms (with the default being percentage, the current behaviour).

This would have a few implications:

• For a bucket fixed in absolute terms, the allocation percentage would become a calculated field. Any percentage value stored on the model would have to be ignored.
• Handling changes to the total available resources for the period would become less straightforward.
  • The obvious thing to do is to allocate the changes to fixed-by-percentage buckets, but if there are fixed-by-absolute buckets as well, this would result in their percentages changing.
  • The simplest reasonable course would probably be, if the total resources are increased, ask the user which bucket the new resources should be added to; if the total resources are decreased, let the percentages go red (on the grounds of adding up to more than 100%) and let the user decide which bucket(s) to take the resources from.
  • This could be done by some kind of "balance" button on the bucket which would allow the bucket resources to be adjusted such that the whole adds up to 100% again.

[amdw]

A related idea to this is to have a button which allows the user to set the fixed limit for a bucket to the total resource estimate of all the objectives in the bucket.

[amdw]

It might be better to continue expecting that the percentages (on buckets which have them) add up to 100%, and then calculate the absolute limit by subtracting the total of all fixed-absolute buckets from the total resources available.

This would remove the need to change percentages when adding resources or changing fixed limits.

It would mean that for percentage buckets, the percentage of the total team resources would be different from the user-specified percentage. But this is easily calculated and displayed.

[amdw]

Another idea to bear in mind is we may want other types of allocation limit in the future, e.g. make the limit equal to the sum of all resource estimates in the bucket, or equal to all allocations in the bucket.