Additional Metrics for Agile Projects
The project with the advent of Agile, the approach towards project metrics has been changed. Agile evangelists started coaching teams that it is important to understand the concept and actual use of any metric rather than measurement for measurement sake.
A metric is a measure or a combination of measures for quantitatively assessing, controlling or improving a process, a product, a team.
These are additional metrics to be used when team or management want to measure one level deep from basic metrics. The basic metrics information is shared in my other post Basic Metrics
| S.no | Metric | Definition |
| 1 | Estimation Accuracy | The ability of teams to accurately estimate their work. Measure the Estimation Accuracy as a percentage by dividing the estimated amount of effort by the actual amount of effort spent in Iteration. |
| 2 | User-story acceptance | Progress of the iteration or release tracked using formally accepted user stories by product owner. =Number of accepted user stories / iteration (or release) |
| 3 | Focus Factor | The percentage of the team’s effort that results in finished stories. Measure the focus factor as a percentage by dividing the Velocity by the team’s Work Capacity. = Velocity / Iteration man-days OR =Number of stories completed in iteration / Iteration man-days. |
| 4 | Cycle Time | Represents the time a bug/feature took to get completed, from the time it was prioritized and pushed to work in-progress =Work items In-progress / Average completion rate. This metric can be a powerful demonstration of how reducing WIP can reduce cycle time, which is often a valuable business benefit. Also helps to identify bottle necks in a process flow. |
| 5 | Flow efficiency | In Kanban, Flow Efficiency helps to understand the actual time spent on a work item. = Work Time / ( Work Time + Wait Time) Higher the percentage of Flow Efficiency, better and smoother is the process. Flow efficiency above 40% is generally considered good! this also indirectly helps us to look into the constrains. |
| 6 | Throughput | Throughput is the amount of work items delivered in a given period of time (e.g. week, month, quarter). |
| 7 | Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) | It’s not exactly a metric, but it is a best reporting technique. A Cumulative Flow Diagram (CFD) shows how much work is in any given state within a particular interval of time. I.e. CFD is used to find out how much work is done, ongoing, and in the backlog. |
| 8 | Defect Lead time | Opening date of the defect minus the resolution date (usually the closing date in the defect repository). |
| 9 | Defect Removal Efficiency | This metric measure of the development team ability to remove defects prior to release. = Number of defects resolved by the development team / total number of defects at the moment of measurement. |
| 10 | Test Case Efficiency | To know the efficiency of the test cases being executed in the testing phase. The quality of the test cases can be determined. = (Number of defects detected / Number of test cases run)* 100 |
These are popular metrics, but not the exhaustive list; the metrics should be used for good and helping/guide the team and not for punishing the team for bad metrics reports.
Choose few of the above metrics that fits the purpose, guide the project, and review them often to make sure the right value is achieved.
