Agile metrics are key indicators that help the teamleader organize the development process. For example, Scrum metrics allow you to determine the speed of the team and the rate of completion of tasks within a sprint, and Kanban metrics allow you to determine how long tasks spend in different statuses.
“Agile teams collect metrics for a reason – it’s like a regular check-up. Metrics help them understand how things are going, where problems may arise, and what needs to be improved. Without them, it’s as if the team is walking with its eyes closed, and metrics help to spot and solve difficulties in the processes in time.”
-Ksenia Filippova, Product Owner SimpleOne SDLC
We talk about important agile development metrics and how to work with them in SimpleOne SDLC.
Scrum metrics
Scrum is one of the most popular Agile frameworks that uses a number of specific metrics to evaluate team performance and project progress. These metrics help the team and stakeholders get a clear picture of performance and identify areas for improvement.
Team Velocity (Velocity)
Team Speed indicates how many Story Points a team can complete during a sprint. Story Point is a unit of measurement for estimating the difficulty of a task. The metric should be used in planning future sprints and forecasting project completion dates.
Velocity = sum of Story Points of all completed sprint tasks
On the graph:
- X-axis – sprints;
- Y axis – number of Story Points;
- first column on the graph – how many Story Points the team planned to fulfill during the sprint;
- second column on the graph – how many Story Points the team planned to fulfill during the sprint;
- second column – how many Story Points the team was able to accomplish.
Velocity should be viewed as a trend, not an absolute value, as it can vary from sprint to sprint. Data from multiple sprints will help plan the next iterations – the more data, the more accurately the team can realize sprint objectives and predictably execute plans.
Task Burndown (Burndown Chart)
The Burndown Chart is a chart that shows how much work is left to do in a sprint and how much work has already been done, how evenly labor is being written off across the team.
- the X-axis displays the days of the sprint;
- on the Y-axis – Story Points;
- the ideal line of work shows “task burn-in”;
- real line shows the actual progress of the team;
The task burn-in graph helps the team track progress and determine whether work on tasks in the sprint is progressing as planned. Significant deviations of the actual line from the ideal line indicate problems in planning – the team has taken far more or fewer tasks into the sprint than necessary.
Kanban metrics
Kanban is a method of agile development management. Kanban work uses a set of metrics to track team productivity and find bottlenecks in processes. These metrics focus on the work development pipeline and task completion time.
Cycle Time
Throughput measures the time a task spends in active development – in development management systems, these are statuses from “In Progress” to “Done”. Unlike runtime, it does not take into account the time spent waiting before work on a task begins.
Cycle Time = date of task transition to “Completed” status – date of transition to “In Progress” status
This metric allows you to evaluate the speed of the team and the efficiency of the development process. A decrease in Cycle Time usually indicates an increase in team productivity.
Task Accumulation (Cumulative Flow Diagram)
Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) is a graph that shows the number of tasks in different states (e.g., In Progress, Reviewed, Completed) over time.
- The X-axis displays the time (days or weeks)
- Y-axis displays the number of tasks
- Each task status is represented by a separate area on the graph
This graph visualizes the flow of work to reveal bottlenecks in the process. Expanding areas on the graph indicate the accumulation of tasks in a particular state, which can signal problems.
Lead Time and Cycle Time can also be estimated using CFD:
- Lead Time – across the width of the entire graph: the horizontal distance from when a task appears in the system (the bottom line of the graph) to when it terminates (the top line) shows the average time for a task to travel through the entire system;
- Cycle Time – on the vertical line of the graph between the “In Progress” and “Completed” lines: the higher this area, the more time tasks spend in active development.
SimpleOne SDLC for managing Agile development
Keeping track of tasks and analyzing metrics can be done in an agile methodology-based software product and solution development management system. For example, the SimpleOne SDLC solution includes all of the above metrics – in the Reporting module, you can build graphs by team, product, project, or set of tasks.
SImpleOne’s low-code platform can also be used to build different types of reports:
- histogram;
- circle diagram;
- arrow indicator;
- numerical indicator;
- timescale;
- trends diagram;
- list;
- summary table;
- heat map;
- multilevel table.
For example, a teamleader can build a pie chart that shows the distribution of tasks by different statuses: in progress, coordinated, completed, etc. This chart would be interactive, with drill-down analysis support, allowing the teamleader to drill down into the data, moving from the big picture to more detailed information.
Using drill-down functionality, the teamleader can go to deeper levels of detail. For example, to identify the causes of development delays, a team leader might:
- Start with an overall pie chart showing the distribution of all tasks by status for the current sprint.
- Click on the “In Progress” segment and see a list of all tasks in that status.
- Select a specific type of task (e.g. “Functionality Development”) for further analysis.
- Go to the list of team members who have tasks of this type in progress.
- Select a specific task type (e.g. “Functionality Development”) for further analysis.
- Select a specific developer and view details of their current tasks, including time spent in current status.
- Select a specific developer and view details of their current tasks.
This approach allows the teamleader to quickly create the necessary set of reporting and metrics on the team, which is especially useful for identifying bottlenecks in the development process and making informed decisions to optimize team performance. Drill-down analysis makes it possible to explore development progress data in multiple dimensions without creating many separate reports.
Resume
Agile metrics are a powerful tool for evaluating and optimizing IT product development processes. Metrics allow teams to gain valuable insight into performance, identify bottlenecks, and make informed decisions.
It’s important to remember that Agile metrics are not an end in themselves, but a means to improve processes, and should be used in the context of each team’s specifics. Solutions such as SimpleOne SDLC can make working with metrics much easier with visualization and analysis tools. This will allow the team to focus on what matters most – creating a quality product.
