Team Productivity
Product Quality
Potpourri
Terms Associated with Metrics
Anti Patterns
100
An optional, but often used, measure of the average amount of Product Backlog turned into an Increment of product during a Sprint. This metric is tracked by the Development Team for use within the Scrum Team.
What is Velocity?
100
A measure of the number of defects caught after a story met it’s definition of done, found outside of a Sprint, or reported in production.
What is Escaped Defects?
100
What is the average number of times per month software is released to Production?
What is Release Frequency?
100
A way to measure performance and to evaluate the success of a product, service or organization.
What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?
100
A behavior where the entire squad focuses on the top of the Sprint Backlog, where possible. When a squad has too many backlog items in progress, has individual ownership of backlog items, or is experiencing heavy context switching, this technique is typically recommended.
What is Swarming?
200
A metric used to compare a squad’s committed versus completed story points within a Sprint.
What is the Commit vs Complete, or Say/Do ratio?
200
A measurement which tracks the average amount of time it takes a squad to close a defect, from the time a defect is found to the time it is closed. Typically measured in hours or days.
What is Defect Cycle Time or Defect Aging?
200
A monthly pulse survey which provides an indicator of the employee experience, measuring the likelihood of recommending Liberty Mutual as a place to work and how inspired, valued, and motivated our employees feel.
What is Employee Net Promotor Score eNPS?
200
A term used to describe the in-depth process of capturing customer’s expectations, preferences and aversions.
What is Voice of the Customer (VOC)?
200
An often misunderstood metric erroneously used to compare one team’s delivery to another, and sometimes mistakenly used to measure a team’s success. Even worse, this metric is at times wrongly used to evaluate individual performance.
What is Velocity?
300
A graphical representation of work left versus time, used to predict when a sprint will complete. Outstanding task hours or story points are typically found on the vertical axis, and time along the horizontal axis.
What is the Sprint Burndown Chart?
300
A measure typically used by the Development Team indicating the amount of product code that is exercised by unit tests. However, this metric does not guarantee that the Increment is defect free.
What is Code Coverage?
300
As a means to graphically track progress of a release and when all work will be finished. The outstanding work in the Product Backlog can be found on the vertical axis, while time (or Sprints) can be found on the horizontal. Total Backlog size may also be tracked.
What is a Release Burnup or Burn down Chart?
300
An index ranging from -100 to 100 that measures the willingness of your customer to recommend a product or service to others.
What is Net Promotor Score (NPS)?
300
This is one of the Agile Manifesto’s twelve principles, and can be considered a guiding principle when using metrics to measure progress. When teams point research spikes to “get credit”, this is not in the spirit of the Agile Manifesto.
What is “Working software is the primary measure of progress”?
400
A measure of the average time spent working on user stories or features, from the start of the first task through the story meeting it’s Definition of Done. In Kanban this metric is calculated by Work in Progress divided by Throughput (average completed stories per day).
What is Cycle Time?
400
A service level metric that measures the time between when an incident is reported until the incident is resolved. Typically measured in business hours.
What is Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR)?
400
Also known as “Concept to Cash”, this metric helps us understand how long it takes to move from an idea in the Product Backlog and into Production. Hint: Cycle time is a subset of this metric.
What is Lead Time?
400
A defined process in which one learns by trying out an idea and then measuring it to validate the effect. Each test of an idea is a single iteration in a larger process.
What is Validated Learning?
400
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.
What is Goodhart’s Law?
500
This artifact is used by Kanban teams (but can also be used in Scrum) to graphically depict the amount of work in a given state (not started, in progress, and complete).
What is a Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD)?
500
A measure of code complexity used by the Development Team, based on the number of independent logical branches through a code base, expressed as a simple integer.
What is the Cyclomatic complexity?
500
What are the total direct and indirect costs of the application, including the Development Team effort and maintenance costs. This is why Product Owners care about Quality and Technical Debt.
What is Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)?
500
A core component in the Lean Startup build-test-learn feedback loop, this is usually the first step of the process to build a minimum set of features to deploy a product and to gather feedback and test assumptions from early adopters.
What is a Minimal Viable Product (MVP)?
500
Also known as the “observer effect”, individuals and squads change an aspect of their behavior in response to their awareness of being observed.
What is the Hawthorne effect?
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