Allocation overview

Last updated: March 25, 2026

Understanding how work is categorized across investment categories, and what features are AI-native

AI Investment Mix

  • AI-native

  • Span analyzes code diffs and issue metadata to automatically classify each PR and issue into categories like Feature Development, Maintenance, Dev Experience.

  • Users can override the AI-inferred category assignment.

Labeled Investment Mix

  • Manual. This version uses explicit Jira tagging or field mapping to categorize work.

  • Example: issues are labeled as New Feature, Maintenance, Bugs, Tech Debt, etc. in Jira.

  • Span reads those fields (Epics, Components, Labels, Custom Fields) and rolls up the cost or time investment accordingly.

  • It’s rule-based, no AI inference.

Workstreams

  • AI-native

  • Span analyzes code diffs and issue metadata to automatically create a “word cloud” like topography of initiatives happening within the organization.

  • This list of workstreams can be optionally customized by mapping Span’s terminology into customer-supplied terminology.

    • NOTE: This is feature-flagged, please reach out to your Span team to enable workstream mapping.

Cost Capitalization

  • Manual.

  • We ingest the list of Epics from Jira that your team is working on.

  • Teams then tag which epics are capitalizable vs. not. Either in the Span UI, or in Jira (we sync those labels in).

Workstream-centric Cost Capitalization (Beta)

  • Hybrid. Part AI, part human review.

  • We use the Workstreams as the foundation for a review process in which managers review time allocation and whether the workstreams are capitalized or not.

  • This avoids the need for rigorous jira Epic organization. Our AI power is doing the clustering, on top of which capitalization status is set by the user.

  • Please reach out to your Span team if you're interested in this feature.

FTE-d

  • FTE-d quantifies effort using FTE days (driven by timestamps of issues/PRs) and optionally converts that to cost if salary-band data is provided.

  • See here for more information on FTE calculation.