Agile Metrics

As a tester you will always find yourself absorbed in metrics creation, reporting on anything and everything that your management team wishes to report on. However, in agile development environments, sometimes its very difficult to assess the importance of metrics. I've been looking at some ways to provide management teams with interesting and useful information to measure our success.

One of the most fundamental approaches we can take towards metrics collection in an agile environment is the Return On Investment that a collection of metrics can give us. That is, how can our metrics help us provide more business value.

Using measurement goals such as only having 5 serious defects found in production after release give us more incentive to produce less buggy code.

Measuring the time it takes from the conception of a user story to seeing that user story providing business value also gives us an idea of how we are performing as a team. This is known as cycle time.

These metrics give us valuable information that provide us with the correct means to motivate a team.

Using the following principles, we can develop metrics that give us a decent ROI from our metrics:

Achieving SLA's relating to service and availability of products and systems.

1. Low cycle time, that is, a high throughput of change.
2. Low amount of unplanned work.
3. Effective process improvement practices.
   
4. Effective change management.

We can build metrics around these principles that give us usable metrics that bring value and motivation to a team.