Agile Delivery Kit for Software Organisations

v1.0.18

How to work in an agile way. This starter kit provides the strategies, recipes. workshops, technologies, practices, and guides that will help you and your people create a way of work that enables success.

Overview

Metrics and Reports

Practice

  

2 minutes to read

Last Updated: Wed 25 Oct 2023 11:15

In order to understand how your team is doing we need to have metrics that we can monitor across all of [Company]. There are two focuses of this work, first is the Product/Project/Organisation focus and second is the Team focus.

###Background material

  • [EBM Guide]

Product/Project/Organisation Focus

Here are the key metrics that should be collected and made transparent for every Product/Project/Organisation.

  • Customer Satisfaction - Some form of sentiment analysis to help gauge customer engagement and happiness with the product.
  • Employee Satisfaction - Some form of sentiment analysis to help gauge employee engagement, energy, and enthusiasm.
  • Defect Trend - Measurement of change in defects since the last measurement. A defect is anything that reduces the value of the product to a customer, user, or to the organization itself. Defects are generally things that don’t work as intended.
  • Mean Time to Repair - The average amount of time it takes from when an error is detected and when it is fixed. This helps reveal the efficiency of an organization to fix an error.
  • Release Stabilization - The time spent correcting product problems between the point the developers say it is ready to release and the point where it is actually released to customers. This helps represent the impact of poor development practices and underlying design and codebase.
  • Deployment / Release Frequency - The number of releases per time period, e.g. continuously, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. This helps reflect the time needed to satisfy the customer with new and competitive products.

Team Focus

At the team level we should focus on the flow of value to the stakeholders. For this to work we should collect and monitor the following:

  • Work in Progress (WIP)- The number of work items started but not finished. Note the difference between the WIP metric and the policies a Scrum Team uses to limit WIP. The team can use the WIP metric to provide transparency about their progress towards reducing their WIP and improving their flow.
  • Cycle Time - The amount of elapsed time between when a work item starts and when a work item finishes.
  • **Work Item Age ** - The amount of time between when a work item started and the current time. This applies only to items that are still in progress.
  • Throughput - The number of work items finished per unit of time.

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Things that we should not monitor (but the Team can for their own edification if they desire):

  • Story Points
  • Velocity
  • Remaining Work
  • Original Estimate
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