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Repository: govuk-rota-generator

GitHub
govuk-rota-generator
Ownership
#govuk-platform-security-reliability-team
Hosting
N/A
Category
Utilities

README

Generates a balanced rota, taking into account each developer’s availability and eligibility for different cover types.

There are some limitations to the generator, which we hope to resolve in future iterations:

  1. Currently no way of capping certain shift types (e.g. maximum two shadow shifts).
  2. It doesn’t account for different working patterns (e.g. devs who don’t work Fridays currently have to find cover)
  3. The week is marked as ‘unavailable’ even if only one cover type is off limits. For example, a developer may say they’re unavailable to do on-call at the weekend, but they would still be available to do in-hours shifts.
  4. It doesn’t account for bank holidays.
  5. It doesn’t account for team burden (i.e. there’s nothing preventing it allocating multiple devs from the same team on one shift).
  6. It doesn’t give a perfectly balanced rota (some devs will be allocated more slots than others), but a ‘balancing’ step after a first pass could be something we look at in future.

We hope one day to make the rota generator think in terms of days rather than weeks, and also have tighter integration with the pay-pagerduty repo (e.g. merging together under a new name).

Usage

Once you’ve generated a /data/combined.csv file as per Creating the input data, you can generate a rota by running ruby /bin/generate_rota.rb (it will output to STDOUT).

Tweak the weighting in that file to place more or less emphasis on different cover types (e.g. oncall_primary).

The generated output can be used as the data/rota.csv in pay-pagerduty, which automates the overriding of PagerDuty schedules.

Creating the input data

This was very much hacked together for a prototype, and needs rebuilding properly at some point.

  1. Download the Technical Support Google Sheet as a CSV, storing in data/people.csv. This CSV describes what roles developers are eligible for, e.g. whether or not they can do on-call.
  2. Download Rota Availability Google Forms Responses as CSV, store as data/responses.csv. This CSV describes which weeks developers are unavailable.
  3. Edit the responses.csv file so that it looks something like below. It may be easier to export to Google Sheets first, and then rename the first row columns to “Week 1 (03/04/23 - 09/04/23)”, and so on. Then re-export the CSV from Google Sheets.
Timestamp,What is your name,What team will you be on? (team),"If you work different hours to the 9.30am-5.30pm 2nd line shifts, please state your hours",Do you have any non working days? [Non working day(s)],Week 1 (03/04/23 - 09/04/23),Week 2 (10/04/23 - 16/04/23),Week 3 (17/04/23 - 23/04/23),Week 4 (24/04/23 - 30/04/23),Week 5 (01/05/23 - 07/05/23),Week 6 (08/05/23 - 14/05/23),Week 7 (15/05/23 - 21/05/23),Week 8 (22/05/23 - 28/05/23),Week 9 (29/05/23 - 04/06/23),Week 10 (05/06/23 - 11/06/23),Week 11 (12/06/23 - 18/06/23),Week 12 (19/06/23 - 25/06/23),Week 13 (26/06/23 - 02/07/23),Need to elaborate on any of the above?
10/02/2023 16:54:04,Some Person,Find and View,,,,,,,,"Not available for in-hours, Not available for on-call weekday nights, Not available for on-call over the weekend",,,,"Not available for in-hours, Not available for on-call weekday nights, Not available for on-call over the weekend",,,,

  1. Update the week_headers variable in bin/combine_csvs.rb, so that it knows which columns to read.

  2. Run ruby bin/combine_csvs.rb. This will generate a data/combined.csv file.

The generated file will look something like:

name,team,can_do_inhours_primary,can_do_inhours_secondary,can_do_inhours_shadow,can_do_inhours_primary_standby,can_do_inhours_secondary_standby,can_do_oncall_primary,can_do_oncall_secondary,forbidden_weeks
Some Person,Find and View,false,false,false,false,false,true,true,"6,10"