Estimate engineering learning curve

Estimate a team-fixed-effects power-law learning curve with work-size adjustment, cluster bootstrap uncertainty, and a defect-rate quality guardrail.

What it's for

Quantifies whether comparable engineering work is genuinely becoming easier with experience without celebrating speed that degrades quality.

What you give it

Inputs split into evidence read from your connected systems, calibration your team owns, and numerical controls that affect precision but never the result's meaning.

Field Type Role Required
bootstrap_draws integer ≥ 200, ≤ 20000 Numerical control Optional
completed_work array of objects (6 fields) ≥ 100 items Evidence Yes
confidence_level number ≥ 0.8, ≤ 0.999 Your calibration Optional
quality_degradation_tolerance number ≥ 0, ≤ 1 Your calibration Optional
ridge number ≥ 0, ≤ 100 Your calibration Optional
seed integer Numerical control Optional

Each completed_work record

Field Type Required
defect_rate number (≥ 0, ≤ 1) Yes
duration_hours number (> 0) Yes
experience_index number (≥ 1) Yes
id string (non-empty) Yes
unit_id string (non-empty) Yes
work_size number (> 0) Yes
Example input
{
  "bootstrap_draws": 200,
  "completed_work": [
    {
      "defect_rate": 0.1,
      "duration_hours": 28.284271247461902,
      "experience_index": 1,
      "id": "work-0-1",
      "unit_id": "team-0",
      "work_size": 2
    },
    {
      "defect_rate": 0.1,
      "duration_hours": 28.137248381171474,
      "experience_index": 2,
      "id": "work-0-2",
      "unit_id": "team-0",
      "work_size": 3
    },
    {
      "defect_rate": 0.1,
      "duration_hours": 28.768923732994573,
      "experience_index": 3,
      "id": "work-0-3",
      "unit_id": "team-0",
      "work_size": 4
    },
    {
      "defect_rate": 0.1,
      "duration_hours": 29.505093853369186,
      "experience_index": 4,
      "id": "work-0-4",
      "unit_id": "team-0",
      "work_size": 5
    },
    {
      "defect_rate": 0.1,
      "duration_hours": 12.340677254400191,
      "experience_index": 5,
      "id": "work-0-5",
      "unit_id": "team-0",
      "work_size": 1
    },
    {

Truncated for display — the full payload is 806 lines.

What you get back

This is the actual output of running the example above — computed by the same function the platform calls, not an illustration.

Example output
{
  "assumptions": [
    "Within each unit, duration follows a power law in cumulative comparable experience after controlling for the supplied work-size proxy.",
    "Unit fixed effects remove stable level differences but not time-varying scope, staffing, tooling, selection, or architecture confounding.",
    "Defect rate is measured consistently and on the same completed-work cohort; speed learning is not cleared when its quality interval exceeds the governed tolerance.",
    "The curve describes team or project process learning and must not be interpreted as an individual productivity ranking or causal personnel effect."
  ],
  "decision": "learning_supported_with_quality_preserved",
  "duration_learning": {
    "duration_reduction_at_doubled_experience": 0.1877,
    "experience_elasticity": -0.3,
    "experience_elasticity_interval": {
      "high": -0.3,
      "low": -0.3
    },
    "progress_ratio_at_doubled_experience": 0.8123,
    "relative_duration_by_experience_multiple": [
      {
        "experience_multiple": 2,
        "relative_duration": 0.8123
      },
      {
        "experience_multiple": 4,
        "relative_duration": 0.6598
      },
      {
        "experience_multiple": 8,
        "relative_duration": 0.5359
      }
    ],
    "within_unit_r_squared": 1,
    "work_size_elasticity": 0.5
  },
  "method": "within_unit_power_law_learning_curve_cluster_bootstrap_v1",
  "quality_guardrail": {
    "allowed_degradation": 0,
    "defect_rate_change_at_doubled_experience": 0,
    "defect_rate_change_interval": {
      "high": 0,
      "low": 0
    },
    "preserved": true
  },
  "sample": {

Truncated for display — the full payload is 51 lines.

How it works

Statistical audit & measurement — Check whether a number is fit to decide on: coverage, timing, reconciliation, and the gaps a dashboard hides.

  1. 1 Estimate a team-fixed-effects power-law learning curve with work-size adjustment, cluster bootstrap uncertainty, and a defect-rate quality guardrail.
  2. 2 Evaluate the method-specific diagnostics and gates returned by the function, then abstain unless the declared decision clears them under locally governed thresholds.

Before you trust it

Every tool in the catalog ships with the conditions under which its answer is meaningful — and the conditions under which it should abstain instead of guessing.

Assumptions & guardrails

  • Metric definitions, weights, aggregate grain, sampling, missingness, dependence, and comparison windows correspond to the management claim being audited.
  • Association, instability, or measurement quality is not a causal effect and must not be converted directly into an individual employment decision.

Minimum evidence

  • completed_work: at least 100 rows/items

How to validate it

Validate on future periods or held-out aggregate units, compare with a simple baseline, and require stability across plausible metric definitions and decision thresholds.

Calibrating it to your org

Same for everyone

The mathematical kernel, validation rules, method version, and JSON output semantics are organization-independent; no tenant-trained coefficients or company benchmark is embedded in the function.

Specific to you

  • within-unit cumulative experience index
  • comparable duration
  • post-completion defect or change-failure rate
  • comparable-work cohort
  • quality degradation tolerance

Calibration workflow

  1. 1 Define the management decision, target outcome, aggregate unit, privacy boundary, cadence, and prediction/intervention horizon for this organization.
  2. 2 Build a tenant-scoped historical cohort using only information available before each prediction or decision; preserve zero periods, censoring, assignment probabilities, and unresolved outcomes when the method requires them.
  3. 3 Estimate statistical parameters on training history, but obtain costs, utilities, risk tolerance, practical-effect thresholds, capacity, and policy constraints from accountable decision owners.
  4. 4 Validate on later time windows or held-out aggregate units at the deployment grain, against a simple baseline and the function-specific validation strategy.
  5. 5 Deploy only if the returned decision clears evidence, overlap, calibration, robustness, and guardrail checks; warning, unsupported, schema-gap, and fallback decisions are abstentions.
  6. 6 Monitor realized outcomes, data drift, coverage, and decision regret; recalibrate at a governed cadence or after a detected regime/definition change, never merely because a stakeholder dislikes the result.

Call it from your AI

You don't wire up 388 tools in your MCP client. The GitRevio MCP server exposes 18 tools, three of which let an agent search the catalog, read a tool's schema, and run it — so the assistant finds this one on its own.

gitrevio_capabilities_search
  { "q": "estimate a teamfixedeffects powerlaw learning curve" }
  → finds "estimate_engineering_learning_curve"

gitrevio_capability_describe
  { "capability_id": "estimate_engineering_learning_curve" }
  → returns the input schema and agent guidance shown on this page

gitrevio_capability_run
  { "capability_id": "estimate_engineering_learning_curve", "arguments": { ... } }
  → returns the result shown above

Works in Claude Desktop, Claude Code, Cursor, Cline, Continue.dev, Goose and Aider. See the MCP server.

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