InfoQ Homepage Value & Metrics Content on InfoQ
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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.
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Size Estimation Approaches for Use with Agile Methods
Reifer’s software sizing survey identifies five commonly used methods for sizing agile projects along with their strengths and weaknesses. Size is used as the basis for measurement and estimation. Stories/story points is the most popular, while function points are used at the project level. Sizing by analogy, proxies, Halstead vocabulary and hybrids are used by others as the situation warrants.
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Q&A with Vasco Duarte on the #NoEstimates Book
In the book NoEstimates: How to Measure Project Progress Without Estimating Vasco Duarte explores how NoEstimates can help to manage projects with a focus on value and predictability, report progress quickly and often, and adapt plans constantly based on existing data.
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Scrum Fundamentals and Advanced Live Lessons : Video Review and Interview
Tommy Norman’s Scrum Fundamentals and Advanced Live Lessons training videos help beginners to understand the basic agile and Scrum concepts. The videos run more than nine hours, broadly divided between “Scrum Fundamentals” and “Advanced Scrum”. The video sessions use animations to explain the concepts.
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A Fast Story Point Estimation Process
Estimating story points can be a tedious process. So tedious in fact that some teams abandon doing story points to help predict their velocity. Instead of letting go of this valid way to predict upcoming work, how about finding a way to make the process of estimating points much faster? Not only faster, but FUN! Yes, story point estimation and fun in the same paragraph!
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Probabilistic Project Sizing Using Randomized Branch Sampling (RBS)
Analyzing all the stories in a project requires significant time. How can we estimate the size of a project without prior identification and analysis of every single user story? If you don't want to analyze all user stories in your project in order to estimate its size then Randomized Branch Sampling is an approach you can use for portfolio related decisions and quotations on prospect projects.
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Quantifying the Impact of Agile Software Development Practices
Rally Software and Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) are researching the impact of agile software development practices using data from Rally’s Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform. InfoQ interviewed Larry Maccherone and Jim McCurley about their collaboration, measurements from the study, conclusions from the analysis and plans for further research.