How do you measure agile quality?

1 Agile quality dimensions

Agile quality is a multidimensional concept, encompassing the quality of the product, process, team, and organization. Each dimension has its criteria and indicators to measure quality. For product quality, you can use metrics such as defect density, test coverage, customer feedback, and user satisfaction. And you can evaluate process quality with metrics like velocity, cycle time, lead time, throughput, and waste. Assess team quality by looking at team morale, cohesion, autonomy, and performance. Lastly, measure organization quality by organizational agility, business value delivery, customer loyalty, and employee engagement.

2 Agile quality practices

To achieve high levels of quality in each dimension, agile teams must adopt and implement various practices that help them build quality into their products and processes. Test-driven development (TDD) involves writing automated tests before writing the code, then refactoring the code to pass the tests. Continuous integration (CI) means integrating the code from different developers into a shared repository frequently, and running automated tests to verify its quality. Continuous delivery (CD) requires delivering the code to the production environment automatically or with minimal human intervention, after passing the quality criteria. And pair programming involves two developers working together on the same code, one writing and one reviewing. Code reviews refer to inspecting the code written by another developer, and providing feedback and suggestions for improvement. Also, refactoring involves improving the internal structure and design of the code without changing its external behavior. All of these practices help ensure quality and reduce defects, reduce time-to-market, increase feedback loops with customers, enforce coding standards, and prevent technical debt.

3 Agile quality tools

In order to support and facilitate agile quality practices, agile teams need to use various tools that help them automate, monitor, and improve the quality aspects. Testing tools like JUnit, Selenium, and JMeter can create, execute, and report on different types of tests such as unit tests, integration tests, functional tests, performance tests, and security tests. CI/CD tools like Jenkins and GitLab can automate the integration and delivery of the code while performing tasks like building and testing. Code analysis tools such as SonarQube and CodeClimate can analyze the code for various quality attributes such as complexity, readability, maintainability, and security. Quality dashboards like Grafana and Kibana can visualize and track quality metrics as well as provide insights and recommendations for improvement.

5 Agile quality tips

To enhance agile quality performance and overcome agile quality challenges, agile teams should define and communicate the quality vision and criteria to create a shared understanding of quality. Collaboration and learning from each other can help share knowledge and skills, while automating and optimizing quality processes with agile tools can improve efficiency and reduce errors. Additionally, monitoring and improving quality outcomes with data and feedback can help identify and address any issues.

6 Here’s what else to consider

This is a space to share examples, stories, or insights that don’t fit into any of the previous sections. What else would you like to add?