How do you measure the performance of your project and your team? By counting the number of tasks completed or the number of days, the members showed up for work?
Let’s go back in time a bit. For getting to the next level in your academics – be it next standard, school, college, or university, one of the primary criteria for selection was your marks (or grades). Merely passing the examination was never sufficient.
Why?
Because passing means completing that particular class, course, or degree. But in no way it shows how good you are. Although, of course, just marks don’t tell you about a student’s performance, it happens to be one of the major ones.
Similarly, just knowing that specific tasks are complete is not enough. Because it doesn’t tell you how well the final product will perform.
Just like you were evaluated in various subjects, practicals, quizzes, sports, cultural activities, and others, you need to assess a project and the team’s performance in different areas.
In this article, we will be talking about agile metrics, why you need them and some of the significant metrics used.
Table of Contents
What Are Metrics In General?
Before getting into agile metrics and all that, let’s first understand what metrics are.
Metrics are measures of quantitative information that are analyzed and compared to track the progress and performance of a particular product, service, or any project in general. These metrics even include the production and manufacturing of large-scale and small-scale goods.
Let’s go back to our previous example of marks. You had a marks card that contained your score on various subjects and other activities like sports, music, yoga, and physical education to know the overall performance. It also had columns for remarks by the respective teachers.
Now, coming back to projects and businesses, the various measurements of different areas of the project are grouped in the dashboard. These metrics are analyzed from time to time by analysts, managers, employees, stakeholders, and others involved in the project.
How are they useful?
The metrics you need to keep track of depend on your project, organization, and industry. But some of the common ones are operations, finances, expenses, resources, quality, and marketing. So now, let’s talk about how these metrics are helpful.
- Most business decisions take into account return on investments (ROI). For example, manufacturing industries need to know how much profits a product makes to continue or stop its production.
- Metrics help keep track of processes like website traffic, app downloads, and marketing campaigns. These numbers are measured daily and help you quickly identify issues where external interference is needed.
- Metrics involves feedback and opinions too. They let you know if you are meeting the customer’s requirements or not. The numbers indicate which areas of your product or service to retain, improve, change or discard.
- Metrics highlights the key areas to be improved that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. It might be a department, team, or individual.
What are agile metrics?
As you already know, a significant number of software development teams use Agile methodology. Agile metrics are various measurements or standards used to track the progress and productivity across the different stages of SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle).
Agile metrics don’t just track the progress of a software product. Instead, it measures various aspects of an agile team like productivity, work quality, predictability, team health, and, more importantly – how much value the product provides to the customer.
Agile metrics are quite different from traditional KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). While the conventional KPIs focus on the output, agile metrics focus on the outcomes.
Types of Agile Project Metrics
Even though there are quite a few agile metrics, you can broadly classify them into three groups:
- Kanban metrics – These metrics focus on workflow, organization, and prioritization. E.g., cumulative flow.
- Scrum metrics focus on the predictable delivery of products and services to the end-users. E.g., burndown chart and team velocity.
- Lean metrics – These metrics focus on the flow of value from organization to customers through eliminating waste. E.g., lead time and cycle time.
Why are metrics important to Agile projects?
As you already know, the main principle of Agile is continuous improvement. But this is not something that you can impose upon the teams. On the contrary, it should come from within – teams should become better through self-improvement.
Agile focuses on immediate delivery for sure. But doing so by overlooking self-improvement affects the productivity of the individuals. A team that gives enough importance to self-improvement brings better results.
Self-improvement is a long-term process that requires a proper framework. That’s why agile metrics track the quality of the product and the team performance, thereby supporting self-improvement.
The benefits of agile metrics are not just limited to continuous improvement. They help strike a balance between delivering high-quality products and continuous improvement of the teams. Essentially, these metrics help the agile teams to become self-organizing and self-managing.
11 Significant Agile MetricsÂ
Now that you know what agile metrics are and how useful they are let’s see some major ones.
Sprint burndown
As you already know, Agile teams work in sprints. Before starting every sprint, the team forecasts how much work they can complete within a timeframe. These tasks are called story points, and the sprint burndown tracks how many “story points” the team finishes throughout the sprint.
The sprint burndown chart has the x-axis representing the time and the y-axis representing the remaining work. The chart measures the work either in hours or story points. The main goal of the sprint burndown report is to complete all the forecasted tasks within the sprint. Burndowns are highly effective as you can track the team’s progress in real-time.
Velocity
Velocity represents the average work a team can complete in a Sprint. It guides the team to plan their work sustainably for an efficient development process. Please note that velocity is not a target or a measure of efficiency.
Velocity is very helpful to determine and forecast the quantity a team can produce. In addition, it helps in the planning of future sprints and indicates the team’s ability to complete the backlogs.
Usually, the velocity of a team increases with time and experience. If you see it decreasing, there are some problems like inefficient sprint planning, misunderstanding, lack of collaboration, and miscommunication. Please find it and fix it.
Epic and Release Burndown
Epic and release burndown is similar to sprint burndown but tracks the larger bodies of work rather than just the sprints. It measures scope creep as well. Scope creep nothing but the new requirements added after a project’s scope is defined. Thus, this metric focuses on the team’s productivity before, during, and after the project.
Control ChartÂ
Measuring the project’s progress is not enough. You need to measure the individual tasks too. Each task or issue will take time from being in the “in-progress” state to the “done” state. This cycle time is the focus of the control chart.
The control chart measures the cycle time of individual issues. This chart gives an idea of a team’s capacity to deliver. The shorter, the better. They will have better throughput. Also, when teams demonstrate consistency in cycle times, it becomes easier to predict the deliveries.
Lead Time
While the cycle time is the time between starting the task to its completion, the lead time is between the task creation and its completion. Therefore, after the team creates a work item into the backlog, it takes time to get started.
Thus, lead time measures how long a team takes to get things done. This metric makes it easier for the teams to identify inefficiencies and move the tasks faster.
Throughput
Throughput measures average work or the number of tasks completed in a given time frame. It indicates a team’s productivity by measuring the completed story points per iteration, release, week, month, and quarter.
Throughput is one of the crucial metrics because it tells you the average time taken to develop software. It indicates a team’s efficiency and lets the managers estimate the delivery.
Cumulative Flow Diagram
A cumulative flow diagram (CFD) measures the state of a work in progress in the Kanban system. It shows the status of different tasks by plotting it on a chart with the x-axis indicating story points and the y-axis telling time.
An ideal CFD is smooth from left to right and visually represents all the tasks in the workflow. Therefore, you can easily identify any bottlenecks and address them quickly without causing any delay in the delivery.
Work Item Age
Work time age or aging work-in-progress measures the time passed between the start and completion of the current task. This metric is used to track the unfinished tasks and is not the same as cycle time but complements it.
Work item age helps you detect the timeline of unfinished tasks and understand how those tasks are moving forward. You can also check your team’s previous performances in similar contexts.
Blocked time
Sometimes, a person cannot complete a task because of external dependency. Blocked time is a metric that assigns a blocker sticker to such tasks. It is like a waiting list. Once the team fulfills the dependency, you can move the blocked card to the task board.
The moment a card or task gets blocked, it signals other members to pay attention. Thus the external dependency gets fulfilled, clearing the path for the task. And yes, this metric is used in Kanban boards.
Code Coverage
While building any software, the code needs to be tested. In unit tests, only smaller portions of the code are tested. A code coverage metric represents the extent to which the unit test covers the entire code.
Thus, code coverage is the percentage of the code covered by unit tests. It can be measured by the number of statements, methods or functions, conditions, and branches executed during the testing.
Code coverage is an essential metric because it gives you a rough picture of how much codebase has been tested. You can run it automatically with every build, and a low coverage indicates low code quality. But as this metric doesn’t include other tests, a higher coverage doesn’t mean high code quality.
Escaped defects
You cannot talk about software development without talking about the bugs. Most bugs get fixed during the testing phase. However, a few additional ones get identified or defined after the code enters production environments. These are the escaped defects.
This number should ideally be zero. But this metric gives you a basic idea of the quality of the deployed software.
Conclusion
We discussed some of the significant and essential agile metrics for agile teams. There are other metrics like value delivered, flow efficiency, failed deployments, release net promoter score, work in progress, and quality metrics, to name a few.
Apart from these, some health metrics like happiness, team morale, and team member turnover. These metrics help track the agile team’s well-being.
Metrics are helpful to understand the overall trends and help the teams make the right decisions. However, choosing the right metrics is critical. It is also
Agile metrics help you analyze the workflow, discover bottlenecks, eliminate waste and continuously improve. You need not track all of them. Instead, choose and follow the ones that are necessary for your team. Which ones to choose? That depends on your project and your team.
