Agile metrics

Agile metrics, Agile KPI reporting, Agile business metrics, Scrum metrics, Velocity, Kanban metrics, Agile flow metrics, DORA DevOps metrics

Agile business metrics and KPIs

  • Customer satisfaction score – CSAT – average score from surveys or questions that evaluate customer satisfaction with the product
  • Delivery speed – average measure of how long it takes the agile team to complete different types of work like new features or bug fixes
  • Net Promoter Score – NPS – an indicator of quality and value based on a single question that asks the customers how likely they are to recommend the product to another person, from not likely to very likely
  • Planned to done ratio – predictability metric that measures the amount of work completed versus the amount of work planned over a given time period
  • Team happiness – agile team’s satisfaction, morale and turnover rate

Scrum Evidence-Based Management Key Value Areas

  • Current Value – CV – the value that the product delivers today, the value that an organization delivers to customers and stakeholders at the present time
  • Unrealized Value – UV – the potential future value that could be realized if the organization met the needs of all potential customers or users
  • Time-to-Market – T2M – the organization’s ability to quickly deliver new capabilities, services, or products
  • Ability to Innovate – A2I – The effectiveness of an organization to deliver new capabilities that might better meet customer needs

Evidence-Based Management – https://www.scrum.org/resources/evidence-based-management

Scrum metrics

  • Sprint burndown chart – a visual graphic showing progress within a sprint, represented as work planned and not done yet against time left in a sprint
  • Epic burnup chart – a visual graphic showing the amount of work done against total work belonging to an epic
  • Velocity – average volume of total story points for the user stories that a team completed in each of the past several sprints
  • Sprint goal success rate – the ratio of sprints where the sprint goal was reached versus those when it was not

Kanban agile metrics

  • Blocked time – total time spent by work items being blocked by an impediment or dependency and blocking the flow of work until they got unblocked
  • Flow efficiency – the ratio between value-adding time and the lead time required to complete a work item, where value-adding time is when actively working towards the completion of a given item and lead time is the time frame between work item creation and its delivery
  • Control chart – visualization of the amount of time spent working on different features during a work period
  • Cumulative flow diagram – visualization of completed work mounting over time using status distribution with different color for different work statuses
  • Cycle time – time spent from when a new work item enters the “In progress” stage and somebody is actually working on it until it is done
  • Lead time – time interval between when a new work item is created and appears in the workflow until its final departure from the workflow system
  • Throughput – measurement of how many story points of work can the team complete during a given amount of time
  • Queue length – live number of items waiting in the to do status
  • Work in progress – WIP – live number of work items that have been started but are not completed yet
  • Work item age – time interval between when a new work item was created and appeared in the workflow until the current time when it is in progress

Agile engineering metrics

  • Code coverage/ Test coverage – the number of lines of code that have been covered by tests, expressed as a percentage from the total lines of code
  • Code review time – amount of time spent on completing code reviews
  • Defect resolution time – time spent to fix defects
  • Escaped defects – the number of issues found in a release or deployment after production
  • Deployment frequency – time measurement of how often code is deployed
  • Failed deployments – number of deployments that have failed in a given timeframe

Flow metrics

  • Flow Velocity – how productive a process actually is, tracking how many items or units of work are completed within a specific period of time and accumulated historical data is used to determine whether delivery rates are accelerating or if they need improving
  • Flow Time – the time that a flow item takes from start to completion, which includes both active times and wait times and is a customer-centric measure that takes the entire product journey into account and helps in predicting delivery speed
  • Flow Efficiency – used to identify whether the waste is increasing or decreasing within the delivery value stream, is comprised of the ratio of active time and wait time and shows the percentage of time that flow items are being worked on vs. the total amount of time they spend in the value stream
  • Flow Load – the number of flow items that are part of the value stream (the work in progress – WIP) and helps to recognize at what point added items are impacting the output

DORA (DevOps Research and Assessment) metrics

  • Deployment Frequency – the cadence or frequency of successful software releases or deployments to production, how often a company deploys code for a particular application
  • Lead Time for Changes – the time that passes for committed code to reach production, the velocity of software delivery, used to get a better understanding of the team’s cycle time and to find out how an increase in requests is handled
  • Mean Time to Recover – the time it takes for a service to bounce back from a failure, the time it takes to restore or recover a system or application after unplanned outages or incidents
  • Change Failure Rate – the percentage of changes that were made to a code that then resulted in incidents, rollbacks or any type of production failure, a true measure of quality and stability

Agile Software Development