Metrics for Agility
The software development industry has a poor track record for developing and employing effective metrics. Most of the metrics employed are tangential to the true goal of software development (which is delivering business value) and are thus ill-regarded by developers, especially agile developers.
However, good metrics are important to management, in order to understand status and progress of their teams, and to make projections into the future. Therefore, we must provide meaningful metrics that give useful information to the business — but also enforce agile values.
In this talk, we discuss the following: velocity, burndown graphs, running tested features, EVM metrics (CPI and SPI), earned business value, and story cycle times. This discussion includes method for calculation, presentation to management, why they’re important, and how they enforce (or fight against) agile values.