Leveraging the Agile methodology offers organizations a chance to streamline their software development process, ultimately making their business more efficient. Measuring the impact of Agile on an application engineering team becomes easier with the use of metrics. The ultimate question is: what kinds of metrics offer the meaningful information and actionable insights software engineers need?
What follows is a look at some examples of useful Agile metrics and how they are able to truly make this modern methodology work for a software development shop. Perhaps your team needs to look at using them as well?
An article for Extreme Uncertainty analyzed the use of Agile metrics and offered a few insights on which ones added value to the software development process. Let’s check them out.
A Burnup Chart gives the project manager or Scrum Master a view of a project’s overall progress by displaying a graph of how many stories are completed during each iteration compared to the total number of stories in the project. This is a simple metric able to be shared with business stakeholders curious about the current status of the work.
The article author, Leon Tranter, commented on the need to fully estimate the effort of each story for the Burnup Chart to be meaningful. If that estimation hasn’t been completed, he suggests using an average for any future stories.
Estimating the development time for stories becomes easier when using metrics aimed at tracking the work spent on these portions of a project. Story cycle time measures the period it takes for a story to go from a ready for development state to its completion. Be sure to take into account the number of resources working on a story for the most accurate view of the overall effort.
Story lead time includes the period between the creation of the story and its ultimate completion. Subtracting cycle time from lead time helps measure the effort spent in analysis.
Story count is essentially the average number of completed stories during a sprint. Once again, combining these three metrics helps to measure the efficiency of a software development team during a project. It also serves nicely when estimating the effort on future projects or sprints.
First time pass rate is a percentage used to track the test cases that pass either system integration testing or system testing on their first try. Tranter feels this is an especially vital metric for measuring the overall maturity level of a software development team’s use of Agile. His expectation for teams familiar with Agile is a rate of 95 to 100 percent. It definitely gives teams new to the methodology a goal worth reaching.
Hopefully, this quick analysis of a few Agile metrics offered some ideas on adding them to your own team’s software process reporting. They are especially worthy of consideration for shops embracing Agile for the first time.
Keep coming back to the Betica Blog for future news, stories, and insights from the rich world of software development. As always, thanks for reading!
Posted on December 9, 2016 | Categories Quality Assurance, Software Development | Tags Agile, Metrics, Quality Assurance, Scrum, Software Development, Software Testing