Agile Metrics

Question:

What are the Top 5 or 10 metrics that you choose at Team, Program, Portfolio level and also for DevOps and Quality/testing area and why? Also what key metrics you showcase to Business to engage them positively. This is a financial services based company already following agile at scale and has a complete CI/CD pipeline in place.

Answer:

For an interview, the purpose may be interviewer wants to understand what all metrics you know and for that, you might use the above metrics mentioned...for practical purposes first thing I think we should ask is what is the purpose of metrics and what specific questions they want to answer? like if they want velocity what exactly they would like to understand from velocity. We need to understand those first.

To guide them is a nice thought ...but we humans make judgment calls often on these metrics :) that's where the whole problem lies...people try to inflate metrics. So teams need safety first, probably the reason why any metrics in general theoretically sound fine but won't really work practically.

At team level or program level or any level ...we must try to improve relentlessly and try to deliver more value with better quality. I know this sounds very generic, but I think that's where teams should start thinking about what metrics better suit them

Team level

- Sprint burndown/burnup, Velocity, Estimation Variance, Scope Variance, Backlog Health, cycle time (Time to build, Time to Value), lead time, throughput, CFD, Escape Defects, Cost of Each Sprint, Cost of Rework, Escape Defects, Defect Density, Build Efficiency, Planned velocity vs. actual velocity. Agile Maturity Assessment at each team level

Program level

- Program velocity, Program Predictability Measure (PPM), ROI, customer satisfaction, feature progress, PI Progress, Deployments and releases per PI, pl/release burndown by iteration, Agile Maturity Assessment at Program Level (ART level), Defect Density, % of test automation coverage, the success rate of builds

Portfolio Level: 

NPS, Team Happiness index

References :

1. https://www.sealights.io/software-development-metrics/11-scrum-metrics-and-their-value-to-scrum-teams/
2. Career groups discussion