AGILE QUESTIONS
What to monitor and measure?
What metrics do you monitor, why and how do you measure them?
Senior Consultant / Florida
Agile coaches answer:
That depends 100% on the context. I don’t have a set of base metrics that I always measure and monitor.
If my customers don’t have an idea what to monitor and why I try to let them discuss and define:
- business value
- estimations (result could be “we don’t want to estimate”, then we try to find a way of getting rid of it)
- cycle time
- throughput / velocity (I know they are not the same, but let’s not get academic ;) )
I appreciate the Product Owners I work with to know what is business value for their product. I want a healthy discussion around the value of and reason for estimates.
The Development Teams I try to encourage to measure their cycle time (how long it takes to develop something from start to end) and throughput (how much work can be finished per day / week / Sprint / …).
Apart from that with some customers I discuss and think about:
- defect rate (defects per time)
- innovation rate (per money unit spent, how much is innovation / new features vs. maintenance, defect fixing and ops)
- customer satisfaction (might be part of business value)
- employee satisfaction
- …
12 of these metrics are described in Evidence Based Management’s Agility Path framework. I hope that helps.
Answer by Peter Götz