With Agile, Digital Engineering Quality is "DONE", but Productivity?

The team agrees on, and displays prominently somewhere in the team room, a list of criteria which must be met before a product increment “often a user story” is considered “done”. Failure to meet these criteria at the end of a sprint normally implies that the work should not be counted toward that sprint’s velocity.

Definition of "Definition of DONE" (Source: Agile Alliance)

In (good?) old waterfall approach days of Digital Engineering, an engineer would say that she is done with her work, once her programming was done!

With advent and adoption of Agile, the Digital Engineering has gone through many fundamental shifts.

One of the most impactful of these shifts is the adoption of Definition of Done

With Agile, at the end of every 15 days (or any other period as per sprint cycle), the engineers have to still tell whether they are done with their work (which in most of the cases boils down to programming), but, with Definition of Done - they still have to answer the question “I know that I am done, but am I really DONE-done?”. So, the engineers typically go through a checklist to proclaim that they are not only done with programming, but also creating test data, testing, bug-fixing, ensuring deployability, documentation etc. etc...

This practice, when adopted in the right way, takes care of almost all of the Quality related concerns. Any additional concerns can be addressed through more rounds of integration, system, regression, performance, security testing etc. - for anything that is not covered in DONE checklist.

And of course, this DONE checklist, keeps getting honed in every cycle. Hence, the Quality related concerns keep getting taken care of with more and more comprehensive Definition of DONE! That is why, we can say that, with Agile, Quality is (mostly) "DONE" (if not in the beginning but surely over time).

Question is, can we say the same thing for Productivity in Digital Engineering?

Some say that the metric of Velocity tackles Productivity.

Unfortunately, that is not true!

Velocity gives a rough indication as to how much work team can plan in next sprint based on some broad understanding of past performance of the same team in similar context. We have typically seen that Velocity goes horribly wrong as a measure of productivity over the changes that team goes through.

So, how do we enhance the Productivity in Agile Digital Engineering?

And before we enhance it, the more fundamental question is, how do we even measure Digital Engineering Productivity?

To answer this, we will need to go back to the roots of Agile that are found in LEAN manufacturing.

In LEAN Manufacturing, to maximize Production (or in other words, to increase Productivity) they try to move as close to "One Piece Flow" instead of "Batch Production"! (Please watch this excellent 47 seconds video by PGK Kadam Academy, to understand how One Piece Flow triumphs?over Batch Production in Manufacturing)

However, in Digital Engineering's Agile parlance, to get to Productivity is still an involved process.

One could aim to measure it in terms of Cycle-Time (basically, time when the work starts, to the time when it gets done, which can be improved by moving towards One Piece Flow) then juxtapose it with Planned-to-Done ratio (that embeds Predictability in the equation), see it in context of Escaped-Defect-Rate (that shows associated Quality) and then basing it off the dollars being spent on the Digital Engineering (Dollars spent on efforts, licenses and subscriptions etc. - to include the Cost - which matters a lot in these recessionary times!). But then, one may need to add other factors, as per their own organization, market, competition and compliance context. Yet, it may not suffice, as one would need to factor in the product lifecycle stage and the valuation goals...And then some...

Whew...!

So, we see that measuring and enhancing the Digital Engineering Productivity is not a trivial thing. But, it is also something that cannot be ignored and delayed any more, considering the productivity disruptions happening!

And that is the raison d'être, the reason of being, of Horizon4 Digital Solutions...

Do contact us at?[email protected], to let us help you in measuring and enhancing the Digital Engineering Productivity!