Agile Metrics Quotes

My advice was to start a policy of making reversible decisions before anyone left the meeting or the office. In a startup, it doesn’t matter if you’re 100 percent right 100 percent of the time. What matters is having forward momentum and a tight fact-based data/metrics feedback loop to help you quickly recognize and reverse any incorrect decisions. That’s why startups are agile. By the time a big company gets the committee to organize the subcommittee to pick a meeting date, your startup could have made 20 decisions, reversed five of them and implemented the fifteen that worked.

If you don’t collect any metrics, you’re flying blind. If you collect and focus on too many, they may be obstructing your field of view.

Recommended Reading Mike Cohn Agile Estimating and Planning provides guidance on iteration planning, including estimating the effort for user stories. David J. Anderson Kanban: Successful Evolutionary Change for Your Technology Business provides the guidance, definitions, and metric calculations necessary to establish an efficient software development flow, including establishing WIP limits.

BUYER’S MATRIX Position: Roles/Responsibilities: What are they in charge of or expected to manage? Business Objectives and Metrics: What do they want to achieve? How do they measure success? How are they evaluated? Strategic Initiatives: What likely strategies and initiatives are in place to help them achieve their objectives? Internal Challenges: What likely issues does the organization face that could prevent/hinder goal achievement? External Challenges: What external factors or industry trends might make it more difficult to reach their objectives? Primary Interfaces: Who do they frequently interact with (e.g., peers, subordinates, superiors, and external resources)? Status Quo: What’s their status quo relative to your product or service? Change Drivers: What would cause them to change from what they’re currently doing? Change Inhibitors: What would cause them to stay with the status quo, even if they’re unhappy?

following one process and the development team with different process philosophies, terms and metrics. In Waterfall, once a “plan” is baked and approved, there is an expectation that the plan will be followed and delivered upon, even if the development team is using Agile to execute. Now I’m going to say it, “But that’s not truly Agile,” since Agile requires the plan to be flexible and consistently reprioritized and revised. We see this approach so often that we’ve heard many describe it as, “WaterScrumFall. ” It’s really business as usual

Some manager mandates that more new work be started before current work has finished. - Resources that are actually doing the work are constantly pulled in multiple different directions and are not allowed to focus on any one thing. - There is a dependency on some external team or vendor.

As the organization becomes more Lean and Agile, the version control system usually needs to be evolved as well. So, keep an eye on this. Find out how long it takes to change one single line of code and get it into production. That may well be the most important metric in the project!

Are you constantly asked to start new work before you have had a chance to finish old work? - Are you constantly asked to expedite new requests in addition to being expected to get all of your other current work done according to original estimates and commitments? - How many features do you start but do not finish because they get cancelled while you are working on them? How likely is it that the new items that replace the cancelled work will themselves get cancelled? - When something that you are working on gets blocked (for whatever reason), do you simply put that blocked work aside and start to work on something new? - Do your estimates give consideration to how many other items will be in progress at the time you start work? - Do you ignore the order in which you work on items currently in progress? - Do you constantly add new scope or acceptance criteria to items in progress because it is easier to modify an existing feature rather than to open a new one? - When an item takes too long to complete, have you ever said or heard someone say “it is just bigger than we thought it was” and/or “it will get done when it gets done”? - When things take too long to complete, is management’s first response always to have the team work overtime?

Figure 1-9. Four principles. To serve memory and use, I’ve arranged these principles and practices into a mnemonic –STAR FINDER. In astronomy, a “star finder” or planisphere is a map of the night sky used for learning to identify stars and constellations. In this book, it’s a guide for finding goals, finding paths, and finding your way. First, we can get better at planning by making planning more social, tangible, agile, and reflective. At each step in the design of paths and goals, ask how these four principles might help. Social. Plan with people early and often. Engage family, friends, colleagues, customers, stakeholders, and mentors in the process. When we plan together, it’s easier to get started. Also, diversity grows empathy, sharing creates buy-in, and both expand options. Tangible. Get ideas out of your head. Sketches and prototypes let us see, hear, taste, smell, touch, share, and change what we think. When we render our mental models to distributed cognition and iterative design, we realise an intelligence greater than ourselves. Agile. Plan to improvise. Clarify the extent to which the goal, path, and process are fixed or flexible. Be aware of feedback and options. Know both the plan and change must happen. Embrace adventure. Reflective. Question paths, goals, and beliefs. Start and finish with a beginner’s mind. Try experiments to test hypotheses and metrics to spot errors. Use experience and metacognition to grow wisdom.

Designing for measurement combined with agility can increase campaign performance by a factor of five or more.

Work In Progress (the number of items that we are working on at any given time), Cycle Time (how long it takes each of those items to get through our process), and Throughput (how many of those items complete per unit of time).

When the I metric is 1, it means that no other component depends on this component (Ca = 0), and this component does depend on other components (Ce > 0). This is as instable as a component can get; it is irresponsible and dependent. Its lack of dependents gives it no reason not to change, and the components that it depends on may give it ample reason to change.

The five letters of the SOLID acronym stand for: Single Responsibility Principle: a class should have one and only one responsibility; that is, only one reason to change. The Lack of Cohesion Of Methods metric indicates the antipattern of too large a class. Open/Closed Principle: a class should be open for extension, but closed against modification. The Case Statement design smell suggests a violation. Liskov Substitution Principle: a method designed to work on an object of type T should also work on an object of any subtype of T. That is, all of T’s subtypes should preserve T’s “contract.” The refused bequest design smell often indicates a violation. Dependency Injection Principle: if two classes depend on each other but their implementations may change, it would be better for them to both depend on a separate abstract interface which is “injected” between them. Demeter Principle: a method can call other methods in its own class, and methods on the classes of its own instance variables; everything else is taboo. A design smell that indicates a violation is inappropriate intimacy.

Once we have centralized our logs, we can transform them into metrics by

common practice of using rumor and hearsay, which can lead to the unfortunate metric of mean time until declared innocent—how quickly can we convince everyone else that we didn’t cause the outage.

should be as easy as writing one line of code to create a new metric that shows up in a common dashboard where everyone in the value stream can see it.

high performers use a disciplined approach to solving problems. This is in contrast to the more common practice of using rumor and hearsay, which can lead to the unfortunate metric of mean time until declared innocent—how quickly can we convince everyone else that we didn’t cause the outage. When there is a culture of blame around outages and problems, groups may avoid documenting changes and displaying telemetry where everyone can see them to avoid being blamed for outages.

a leading predictor of C-suite success is insatiable curiosity and a willingness to learn.4 This learning agility includes learning to adjust the metrics by which you measure your progress.