Most of the business organizations use agile metrics to track and measure the performance of a specific process. Among all these metrics that are vital for the entire business we can select few and mark them as KPIs. This further helps in capturing effectiveness around the achievement of key goals and objectives. Before we dive deep into the wide ocean of agile Metrics we first need to understand the difference between Metrics and KPI. This article envisions to enlighten you around the key agile metrics and the difference between a Metric’s and Key Performance Indicator (KPI).
What are Metrics?
In layman terminology it is a system of related measures that facilitates the quantification of some particular characteristic. These are simple numbers telling us about the importance of a process under question by measuring the parameters around it’s functioning In short metrics are simple standard of measurement crafted by combining one of more measures together. They help track the efficiency, performance and progress or a team, program or organization. There are zillions of metrics out there however not all metrics are KPIs.
What are KPIs?
KPI (key performance indicator) are the quantifiable measures that determine how well company, business or project goals are being met with regards to the strategic goals. In other terms we can define KPI as a performance measurement that helps you understand how the organization or department is performing by tracking current performance against organizational goals and objectives. These should not be confused with company objectives as KPIs are not company goals, they’re only measurement of defined goals and targets. They provide assistance while decision making further helping to improve performance.
How are KPIs and Metrics interlinked?
It’s comparatively simple to explain this correlation as Every KPI is a metric, but not every metric is a KPI. Metrics are there to support KPIs in turn KPIs support the overall business strategic goals and objectives. You can’t improve and enhance your performance till you know what to measure hence it requires a lot of groundwork to come up with the right set of metrics and KPIs which further align to your business goals. KPIs have an obligation towards targets and achieving them within specific time-frames keeping them relevant to business outcomes. On contrary metrics may or may not have all of the above.
Characteristics of Metrics
In this competitive business landscape organizations have n number of metrics to choose from which may land their assets in the tedious process of capturing humongous data. Most organizations find it hard to select the right set of metrics for their business and instead end up measuring and reporting what’s easily available and measurable. As the purpose of this post is to help understand metrics in detail lets try to figure out the key characteristics of Metrics.
- Simple to understand
- Easy to track and measure
- Actionable; as measuring alone won’t yield outcome
- Reliable to track progress and craft plans accordingly
- Strategically aligned with goals and objectives
- Referenceable with established benchmark
How to define Agile Metrics
In all development environments we use metrics to understand the current situation better and gain insight on change over time. Without metrics, assessing any effort or development will be open to gut feeling and bias-based interpretation. Henceforth they are the leading indicators for a pattern change, providing an opportunity to analyze the cause in time. While defining metrics in agile framework following rules must be kept in mind
- Try not to design metrics to track individual performance as it hampers the principle of building collaborative teams.
- Agile advocates to never measure story points per developer per time interval. It also promotes to abstain from comparing velocities across team and setting a velocity benchmark
- In agile world there are multiple tools to fetch out-of-the-box reports. However while creating metrics we need to understand its significance and future use. Never measure based on ease of data extraction instead measure considering the effectiveness if the data.
- While tracking metrics equal emphasis should be laid upon recording the context. Data without context, for example, the number of the available team member, or the intensity of incidents during a sprint, may turn out to be nothing more than noise.
Agile Metrics and Examples
Team Happiness
The first and foremost important agile metrics is team happiness index. As the philosophy of agile revolves around self-motivated and highly independent teams and individual its vital to track the mood of the team.
Escaped Defects
This metric helps team to access the quality of features they develop. This is the measure of bugs or defects which are present in a build deployed to production. In ideal scenarios the count of escaped defects should be zero.
Release Net Promoter Score (NPS)
NPS measures the customer experience based on a given release. This can be amongst the top metrics while capturing customer satisfaction. As it measures customer perception based on the likelihood of referring your product. This can merely be calculated subtracting the percentage of Detractors from the percentage of Promoters.
Lead Time
Lead Time allows for monitoring a story from the point when it enters a backlog till the moment it’s released to production. Effectiveness of development process is measured by a lower lead time.
Sprint & Release Burndown
These burndown charts provide an overview of the work left with regards to time or committed work. They are useful while making predictions around the completion of work or track the status in time. Burndown charts encourage the teams to confront any difficulties sooner and more decisively around the completion of tasks. These charts are really effective as they are very simple to create.
Code Coverage
Code Coverage helps to calculate the percentage of product’s code covered by unit tests. This metric provides an overall perspective on the quality of product as unit tests are incorporated as part of every build. Code coverage can be measured by the number of methods conditions executed as part of a unit test suite.
Velocity
It is a metric for the team to help with sprint planning and help the PO to share long term estimates. It helps the team to gauge how much work they can take to the sprint by looking at the historical trends. These trends help the business make some forecasts nothing beyond that. If project and business are using this metric to track teams or individual’s performance than it’s altogether being used wrongly for a purpose that is wide of the mark.
As explained above implementing agile metrics will bring more clarity to the development process. While defining agile metrics we need to address few of important points to ensure we have the right context for interpretation or comparison in the later run.
- Anything available to measure should not be measured
- Never measure just for the sake of measuring.
Just a mere shift to Agile or defining KPIs / metrics alone won’t help an organization deliver value. So let’s stop expecting miracles from agile and do our best to incorporate value to our products by creating effective and efficient business processes.
