David J. Anderson explains how to use predictability, measurement and change management to balance the factors of observed capability, staffing, and delivery targets to achieve predictable outcomes.
There have been numerous attempts over the years to determine the best way to measure the effectiveness of an Agile adoption. Some recent articles have reignited the debate around the most useful metrics.
Good measurements support good management. So what metrics should be sent up through the management chain so management can best support Agile software development processes?
Does a the traditional Sprint Burndown chart help the team? A number of Scrum teams find that tracking task hours hides the true state of the sprint and prefer other tools.
The traditional agile approach to prioritization is that user stories of higher business value should be implemented before ones of lower business value. The concept is simple, but implementing it well relies on having a mechanism to assess business value. Pascal Van Cauwenberghe has recently described an approach to defining business value, called "Business Value Modeling", which may help.
Software project success has always been the goal of the industry; however the metrics that helps us measure the success have been as diverse as they could be. Depending on the particular methodology that you follow the set of suggested metrics will not have anything in common. Carlos provides a set of metrics that he and his teams were able to use independent of software methodology.
Justin Sheehy explains why a paradigm shift is necessary when dealing with large concurrent distributed systems and what are some of their requirements: no global state is shared, ACID no longer works but rather BASE and CAP, getting rid of RPC and using protocols over APIs instead, prepare for failure, degradation, understanding the harvest-yield balance, and using measurement.
John DesJardins believes that a new generation of SOA is about to emerge, one based on business performance achieved through continuous process improvements driven by business metrics and IT collaboration. Organizations will measure their businesses alignment with IT in order to asses the impact of services, the impact of changes or new initiatives, up-time, response time, etc.
Project managers new to agile methods often have questions about how to track progress on agile projects. Some of the traditional measures don’t line up very naturally with agile thinking and agile practices. The presentation shows how to project realistic completion dates based on empirical observations based on Velocity for iterative methods and on Cumulative Flow for non-iterative methods.
