Metrics are the tools we use (and misuse) to help us understand how we’re evolving. Used well, Metrics can give us feedback on our team’s experiments and help us become aware of problems sooner. Used poorly, they become a stick to beat the team into submission. It’s important to be careful when using them, because all metrics have cost, will introduce noise into the system, and might be gamed.
Bell Curves and Measuring Badly
Measurement for Scrum – What are Appropriate Measures?
Red-Yellow-Green Status Reports and Other Models – How They Should and Shouldn’t Be Used
Simplicity
Misuse of Velocity in Agile Projects
Agile Metrics
The Difference Between Data and Metrics
Resource Links:
- Agile Metrics: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
- An Appropriate Use of Metrics
- Beyond the Happy Bubble – using Metrics to help people see reality
- Data driven coaching – Agile 2016 – Using Data to Tell a Story
- Entangled – Solving the Hairy Problem of Team Dependencies
- Forget dumb productivity measures and focus on software delivery performance with Accelerate’s Four Key Metrics
- How to do a Retrospective using Flow Metrics
- Linear Thinking in a Nonlinear World
- Making sense of organization impediments a presentation and the accompanying paper: Metrics for Understanding Flow
- Measuring and evaluating Scrum in complex environments
- Measuring Team Performance
- Monte Python Simulation: Misunderstanding Monte Carlo
- Talking about Sizing and Forecasting in Scrum
- Team Metrics – Case Study
- The Five Traps of Performance Measurement
- The Happiness metric and a few others (we don’t recommend the use of Happiness as metric; see the items in the subsection below for why)
- The One Formula for Metrics Keep your Metrics simple at first
- We Cannot Measure Productivity
Misuse of Metrics
- Vanity Metrics vs. Actionable Metrics
- Why Vanity Metrics are Dangerous: Holding a Mirror Up to Your Measures of Success
- How Accountants Kill Innovation
- I’m Sorry, But Those Are Vanity Metrics
Happiness Metric
- Scrumming the Scrum (the use of happiness as a Metric in Retrospectives)
- Measuring Happiness on the Team: What is Crisp?
- How Measuring Happiness Helped Us Build a Better Team
- Agile Teams: Don’t use happiness metrics, measure Team Morale the level of rigour supporting this is astonishing.
- How I Measure Scrum Team Morale
METRICS BOOKS
- Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability by Daniel S. Vacanti – covers in depth techniques around measuring cycle time and cycle time variance. If you’re tempted to measure velocity as an indicator of performance, please read this book instead.
- Escape Velocity – Better Metrics for Agile Teams – Doc Norton
- Software Development Metrics Paperback – Dave Nicolette
See Also:
Mark Levison has been helping Scrum teams and organizations with Agile, Scrum and Kanban style approaches since 2001. From certified scrum master training to custom Agile courses, he has helped well over 8,000 individuals, earning him respect and top rated reviews as one of the pioneers within the industry, as well as a raft of certifications from the ScrumAlliance. Mark has been a speaker at various Agile Conferences for more than 20 years, and is a published Scrum author with eBooks as well as articles on InfoQ.com, ScrumAlliance.org an AgileAlliance.org.
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