InfoQ Homepage Value & Metrics Content on InfoQ
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Improving Your Estimation Skills by Playing a Planning Game
Underestimation is still the rule, rather than the exception. One bias especially relevant to the estimation process is the planning fallacy. This article explores the planning fallacy and how we are vulnerable to it. It explains how you can reduce your vulnerability to this fallacy through playing a planning game that has been specifically devised to help mitigate it.
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Reawakening Agile with OKRs?
Corporate agile often represents an improvement over what went before but falls short on delivering the high performance management wants and quality engineering environment developers dream of. The backlog becomes tyranny. Could OKRs - objectives and key results - reawaken the radical side of agile? Or do OKRs represent a return to command and control?
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Q&A on the Book EDGE: Value-Driven Digital Transformation
In the book EDGE: Value-driven Digital Transformation, the authors explain why and how every business today needs to become a digital business with technology at the core. They explain six principles and a variety of practices that organisations can apply to survive and thrive on the creative edge where value is generated.
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On Uncertainty, Prediction, and Planning
This article describes the software industry’s dismal history with predictions and planning in the face of uncertainty. It details some of the reasons why we fail to learn from our repeated mistakes. It suggests alternative approaches that are based on learning and include the strategy of hypothesis testing (Hypothesis-Driven Development) for deciding which features to deliver.
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Agile and Late! End-to-End Delivery Metrics to Improve Your Predictability
Agile teams may need to deliver milestones expected at a certain time, so will need to forecast or risk being accused of being “Agile and late”. There are metrics that relate to the “Logical Six” potential sources of delay which are key to improve forecasting accuracy. The metrics can used to create a Root Cause RAG Progress Report – to share a more accurate forecast and clear mitigations.
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Author Q&A on the Book Software Estimation Without Guessing
George Dinwiddie has written a book titled Software Estimation without Guessing: Effective Planning in an Imperfect World. The book discusses different approaches to estimation for software products, the ways they can go wrong and be misused, and when to use them
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The Importance of Metrics to Agile Teams
This article outlines the importance of and proposes meaningful Agile metrics for teams seeking to raise overall performance and whose members seek to continuously self-improve. It emphasizes that team members should democratically agree and manage these metrics. It also advises what to look for in tools that track performance against agreed metrics over time.
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Agile in the Context of a Holistic Approach
In this article Jon Kern, co-author of the Agile Manifesto, describes a set of critical practices that serve to build up a holistic view of the project, from which all else proceeds. Fail to do a good job at taking the systems view, and your project will likely not go as well as it could. It might even fail.
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Measuring Tech Performance: You’re Probably Doing It Wrong
We try our best to measure our performance, and along the way identify just the right OKRs and KPIs and ABCs. There’s no One True Metric That Matters, but there are some useful guidelines and some all-too-commonly made mistakes. Use measures that focus on outcomes, not output, and measures that optimize for global or team outcomes, not local or individual outcomes.
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Why Software Estimation Is More Important Now Than Ever
In a world trending away from traditional waterfall and toward agile development methodologies, it would be understandable to assume that there is no longer a need for software project estimation. However, that assumption would be wrong - estimation is still a very valuable practice, even in organizations that are dependent upon agile development methodologies.
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Actionable Analytics for Lean Project Management
Measuring the right KPIs of your workflow is the key for implementing successful Lean project management. Applying these actionable analytics is going to help you track your team's progress towards reaching process perfection, allow you to project future performance and help you spot potential problems in an early stage.
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Monte Carlo Planning Improves Decision Making
De la Maza helped a startup IPO by applying Monte Carlo to a planning problem. Learn how Monte Carlo planning provides a rigorous, quantitative account of what the future may bring. It has advantages over standard average case approaches and you can start with a simple Excel spreadsheet.