Agile
14 minutes reading time
Many software development teams that engage in agile practices need help in getting real-time visibility into project progress and team performance.
Some teams don’t track data, so it’s hard to tell whether they’re on the right track or getting more efficient daily. On the other hand, some teams monitor too many stats, thus overwhelming them without focusing on real process improvement. This article describes the agile metrics, which measure all critical aspects of the software development process.
What Are Agile Metrics?
Agile teams can monitor their performance, efficiency, and progress through agile metrics. Cycle time, lead time, work in progress (WIP), throughput, work item age, flow efficiency, and other metrics are of everyday use.
They provide software development teams with insights into their work processes and uncover improvement areas. They enable teams to make data-driven decisions that produce better outcomes.
How do Agile Metrics Drive Productivity in Development Teams?
Because a single metric doesn’t tell the whole story, agile metrics cover various elements, such as how many work items you complete per unit of time, workflow efficiency, and idle time (bottlenecks). Teams can use this data to track the efficiency of their Agile approach, pinpoint improvement areas, and decide how to optimize their workflows.
By utilizing Agile metrics, teams can improve the quality of their products, speed delivery, and better understand the value they provide to clients. Agile metrics allow teams to develop and deliver software products continuously.
Key Metrics to Track for Agile Teams
Issue Lead Time/Cycle Time
Lead time in Agile denotes how long an issue takes (including waiting time), i.e., the time it’s requested to the time it’s delivered. Cycle time is the elapsed time (not process time) for a cycle, such as the time between starting and completing a work item or the elapsed time a work item spends as a work in progress. Calculating lead and cycle time allows you to track each task’s length and utilize that information to improve your project completion estimates.
You can track lead and cycle time metrics with a sprint, Jira board, or a custom tool such as Axify. In the dashboard, you can visualize when the work starts on an issue and when it’s completed for deployment. In Axify, we measure cycle time on three levels: deliverables (e.g., epics), issues, and pull requests.
Throughput
Throughput indicates the number of work items completed over a period of time. Throughput is considered one of the most essential Agile performance metrics. It reveals your team’s capabilities, allowing you to plan more effectively how much work you can complete over a period of time. When throughput and cycle time are combined, they provide the team with a mighty tool to increase the project’s predictability. For example, Axify’s Service Level Expectation graph (Cycle Time Scatterplot) displays completed tasks during a period (in days).
Work In Progress (WIP)
WIP denotes the number of work items currently “in progress” in your workflow. It’s an essential agile metric to follow because it represents all the unfinished chunks of work.
Agile teams tend to reduce their work in progress because doing so increases their throughput and reduces cycle time. Reducing work in progress positively impacts cycle time. You’ll be able to concentrate on the most critical tasks and increase the speed of value delivery to the users. It will also reduce the bad effect of context switching.
Work Item Age
The time elapsed between a work item’s start date and current status is the work item age or aging work in progress. This Agile metric applies only to unfinished work items as a leading signal. It’s a valuable metric besides cycle time, suitable for completed work items.
Typically, we would compare work item age with the Service Level Expectation graph, precisely the 70th and 85th percentiles, to draw attention to old items and “swarm,” i.e., stop what we’re doing and concentrate on completing those tasks that take longer.
Flow Efficiency
Flow efficiency is another crucial Agile project indicator. It displays your productivity from beginning to end. To determine the flow efficiency, you divide the time spent actively working by the total elapsed time, including any phases during which no work is being done.
To check your process efficiency frequently, you use a flow efficiency chart that displays active and queuing times. This makes it easier to identify problems early on and find quick solutions.
Time Investment Summary
The Time Investment Summary provides a detailed breakdown of how you allocate effort across various tasks in your Agile projects. It reveals the percentage of total invested time for each issue type and their average completion time, offering valuable insights into time management and efficiency. By understanding these allocations, teams can identify opportunities for process improvements, ensuring that you spend time on activities that drive project success and align with goals.
Benefits for Teams and Stakeholders
Agile metrics offer valuable insights and feedback on the performance of the development team and the efficiency of workflows, hence promoting continuous delivery and generating faster impact for the organization. Teams can continuously improve the quality and speed of their work by tracking metrics, including cycle time, lead time, throughput, WIP, work item age, flow efficiency, and blocked time. These metrics allow teams to discover areas for improvement, optimize processes, and make data-driven decisions. Metrics are helpful for teams as a guide and a decision-making tool rather than to evaluate and compare teams.
Also, teams can promote openness, cooperation, and a shared commitment to continuous improvement by discussing and sharing metrics with stakeholders. Agile metrics provide stakeholders with authentic and accurate information concerning a project’s progress and efficiency. Using Agile metrics, stakeholders may monitor progress, pinpoint areas for improvement, and decide project priorities and resource allocation.
By observing these metrics, stakeholders can assess whether the project is on pace to accomplish its objectives, spot possible risks or delays, and modify priorities and resource allocation. This will ensure that you spend resources effectively and that project priorities match the company’s goals.
What Makes an Agile Metrics Dashboard Useful?
Agile metrics dashboards support software development teams in making better decisions, promptly evaluating the state of ongoing work, and locating bottlenecks. An agile metrics dashboard that shows the team’s performance and sprint progress can improve your project’s health. You can create the best agile metrics dashboards for your development team using a proper tool such as Axify. But what makes a good Agile metrics dashboard?
Easy to Understand and Shows the Big Picture
Agile metrics dashboards can help you display your messy data in easy-to-understand analytics. This dashboard should provide a simple and clear overview of each team’s software delivery performance. Additionally, it should present data to users without being too overwhelming.
Accurate and Up-to-date Data
For software development teams and project managers utilizing the agile approach, an agile metrics dashboard functions similarly to a visual control centre. It dives deeply into your software development processes. It provides an actionable view of important Agile metrics, work progress, high-priority issues, and possible bottlenecks in real time.
In short, an agile metrics dashboard should be:
- Accurate | Agile metrics dashboards should gather reliable data and calculate metrics using proven methodologies.
- Up-to-date | It should be updated regularly and in real time so the team can respond quickly to project direction or performance changes.
- Transparent | The agile metrics dashboard should be easy to use and accessible to the whole team. This allows for open communication and collaboration, which is crucial for agile development.
- Relevant | It should align with the project’s goal and help measure progress toward achieving it.
- Actionable | The agile metrics dashboard should provide insights that the team can act upon to improve performance or adjust their processes.
Choose the Right Tool for Your Agile Metrics Dashboard
Axify is a single platform that allows you to observe all the key performance indicators that will help you improve your development and delivery processes. It provides superior dashboards and real-time tracking of agile metrics, simplifying the whole process and enabling teams to focus on improvement.
Step 1 | Create your free account.
Step 2 | Connect your repositories from your source control management and your issue tracker (such as Jira or Azure DevOps).
Step 3 | Configure your deployments with your CD pipeline and incident tracking with your monitoring system or issue tracker.
Step 4 | Create teams and assign contributors to your teams (optional).
Step 5 | Explore, assess, and enjoy!
Feel free to contact us for a free demo on creating your agile metrics dashboard.