Best 10 Agile Metrics for Software Development and Testing

Agile metrics are the main useful part of Agile philosophy which is used to measure the team’s productivity. By using the Agile metrics team managers and the members can see the consequences of their work and use these data to maintain and improve their workflow to further increase their efficiency. Therefore, in this article, a complete overview has been provided about the Agile metrics and the top 10 Agile metrics.

Understanding Agile Metrics

Agile metrics are used in Agile development to help the teams of Agile development in their development process by maintaining the work quality, gauging productivity, predictability, and health of the team and products being developed. The main purpose of agile metrics is to value to customers. There are mainly three important types of agile metrics which are mentioned below:

1. Scrum metrics: Scrum metrics mainly focus on the predictable delivery of working software to clients or customers. The common metrics include the team velocity and burndown charts.
2. Kanban metrics: The Kanban metrics mainly focus on the workflow, organizing and prioritizing the work, and getting it done. Cumulative flow is a common metric.
3. Lean metrics: The lean metrics are mainly focused on making sure a flow of value from the organization to its customers and also removing wasteful activities. Lead time and cycle time are the common metrics.

Top 10 Agile Metrics

Multiple agile metrics are used for delivering working software to the customer. Therefore some of the most important Agile metrics are mentioned below:

1. Sprint Burndown

Sprint burndown is one of the agile metrics that is applied both in the long-term and short-term- the team managers can develop the sprint burndown scrum reports in real-time to track the team’s progress in the present project – for this they particularly need to estimate the total number of sprints and predict the likely time expenses. Sprint burndown can be used for long terms- the managers can analyze reports on past projects, pinpoint stages that have failed the expected timeframes, and analyze the causes of delays. It also allows tracking the dynamics of the team’s workflow. 

2. Agile Velocity

Velocity is one of the important agile metrics that is used on projects. Agile velocity is used to measure the number of story points completed by a team on average over the past few sprints. Therefore agile velocity can be used to predict the team’s output in the upcoming sprints. Velocity is known to be a powerful metric as it is a result metric to know how much value was delivered to the customers in a series of sprints.

3. Lead Time

Lead time is a type of agile metric that allows the teams to check how much it took for the product backlog entry to arrive at the end of the sprint. Lead time can be used to track the products at any developmental stage task by task or to assess the overall time expenses. Lead time metric can be used by the developers to use this metric while planning for their future work and also to estimate the prices. For every project be sure to record lead time. By using lead time developers can also examine separately every stage.

4. Cycle Time

Cycle time is a type of agile metric that is used to focus on individual tasks and this metric is mainly used to evaluate the duration of a single cycle where one of the cycles is taken by one task which further calculates the number of cycles per project. This metric is also used to measure the accomplished results for the end-user if the product is already beta-tested. With the help of cycle time team members can immediately see if one task takes too much time or if some team members aren’t delivering on their ends.

5. Code Coverage

Code coverage is another agile metric that is used to measure the percentage of the code that is covered by the unit tests and can be measured by the number of method statements, conditions, or branches that are further executed as a part of the unit test suite. Code coverage is used to run automatically as part of every build and gives a crude picture showing how much of the codebase has been tested.

6. Static Code Analysis

Static code analysis is an automated process and not exactly a metric that can provide insights into the code quality and clean the code from simple errors and redundancies. It is used to provide a safe baseline for the code quality and it consists of no substitutes for the human input into the code quality therefore manual code reviews, other methods, and pair programming.

7. Release Net Promoter Score

Net promoter scores are mainly calculated for the release of software which further measures whether the users would recommend the software to others. Therefore it is one of the important gauges of customer satisfaction which involves evaluating the user’s reactions to quantitative and qualitative feedback. After the team analyzed and collected the feedback each of the team members suggested a score that evaluates how much the users are likely to recommend the product.

8. Cumulative Flow

Cumulative flow has a main purpose to accumulate all the project flows and evaluate them in a single diagram. Having such type of graph can provide individuals with a big-scale view which can be further sent to the project stakeholders who didn’t have much time to analyze the more comprehensive reports. Therefore cumulative flow can visualize the bottlenecks in the process.

9. Failed Deployments

Whenever the project is being deployed but fails to attract the users this is recorded as a failed deployment. Therefore sometimes a failed deployment happens to the decisions of one of the stakeholders or the business model which proves to be unreliable. Thus whatever may be the problem the individual needs to record all the failed deployments along with the reasons for their failure. Hence before releasing a new deployment, the team can always have a look at the previously failed deployments and examine if one cannot undergo a similar process. Analyzing the previous issues prevents further issues.

10. Escaped Defects

Every agile project consists of a work cycle or sprint at the end of which a specific task is being delivered. When the work is completed the team manager has to assess the quality of turned-in results. Therefore all the changes, unfixed bugs, and edits are escaped defects. These are the issues that developers could have fixed but didn’t. To know the mistakes record their precise number and nature. After reporting on the escaped defects and the collected tangible statistics the individuals need to discuss the results with the team and make sure that every team member knows about the errors the team misses.

Implementing Agile Metrics Effectively

To implement agile metrics effectively in businesses individuals need to know how to measure success. These agile metrics help the individuals and the team members to keep a realistic and data-based overview of the progress so that it can be made sure that it consists of higher productivity, better quality, and also improves satisfaction.

Conclusion

Agile metrics are used to help the team members and the project managers direct the teams toward continuous improvement based on real-life data from past work cycles. Therefore in this article, detailed knowledge has been provided about the agile metrics and the top 10 agile metrics that are used to maintain the productivity of the workflow.

FAQs

1. What are Agile metrics?

Agile metrics are the standards that the individuals set and use to measure the work of the team. The Agile metrics can also be referred to as Agile KPIs. These metrics help marketing teams measure the progress and productivity of marketing activities.

2. What are metrics used in Agile?

Agile metrics are mainly used to help the agile team set benchmarks, measure against the goals and evaluate the performance. These agile metrics typically assess predictability, value, and productivity.

3. Name the types of Agile metrics.

There are three types of Agile metrics which are- Kanban metric, Scrum metric, and lean metric which are chosen by the team members based on their goals, requirements of the organizations, and development team.