Agile Metrics is also referred to as Agile KPIs (key performance indicators). Agile metrics give insight of the product development and delivery cycles including productivity, capability, stability, quality, predictability, etc. The metrics may also help to predict the future trend of the metrics being measured.
Velocity metrics can help you track your team’s throughput (or project’s velocity). The Agile Teams can understand their progress and capacity from this metrics. Velocity measures the average work completed by the developers during a Sprint (a fixed time period). The data is reviewed across the Sprint iterations, which will help to predict more accurately. It can be measured in hours or story points (usually). This data helps to assess the ability of the Team to work on the product backlogs in the future Sprint.
The Control chart depicts the time duration between the “in progress” and “complete” status of work. This helps to predict the cycle time of deliveries by assessing the consistency of cycle times across the deliveries by the Team. The Team that has short cycle times indicates that the throughput is high. Consistency and short cycle times are key indicators in this assessment.
The cumulative flow diagram (CFD) shows the state of the workflow of the team over a period of time. The X-axis represents the time. The number of work items is depicted on the Y-axis. When the chart is smooth from left to right (shown in color bands) that is a good indicator of even flow. If the band is narrowed down, then it shows the throughput is higher than the rate of incoming work. If the band is widening, this indicates that the work capacity is greater than the required level and foresee some bottleneck. Based on these data, you can take steps to smoothen the workflow.
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is used to gauging the customer satisfaction level for a product release. It is an indicator of whether the customer would be willing to recommend the product or not. It is measured with an index starting from -100 to 100.
Escaped Defects are the defects identified after the product is released to production, this would cause a severe impact to the system, reputation, even monitory loss to the customer and company. This is a quality metric aim at identifying the bugs that have escaped when a release enters production.
Code coverage metric is a quality measure used to measures the percentage of code that has covered all the unit tests. This metric helps to see how much unit testing has been covered and opportunities for improvement. Although there are other testing aspects to be considered, the metrics focus only on unit testing.
Lead time metrics were originally used in the manufacturing industry. It has been adopted in Agile software development, specifically within the Kanban framework. The Lead time represents the time duration from the time the user story has been created (request from the customer) to delivery of value to the customer.
Cycle time is again a metric derived from the manufacturing industry. The cycle time gives the time duration from the work has started to it is available for delivery. It is a good indicator that shows the ability of the team to deliver value to the customer.
A velocity chart in Agile represents the progress of the project visually that highlights overall project status and the amount of work that the team can handle in the future based on past sprints observed. The Scrum Master can gauge the team performance and can review them periodically to discuss in the sprint events for better utilisation of the team’s capacity.
Sprint Burn down chart is a visual/graphical representation of work in progress by the team at any given point in time during a Sprint. The amount of work that the Team has burned through against the planned Sprint goals. The X-axis shows the time and Y-axis shows the remaining work to be done by the Team. This is a key metric to understand if the Team is on track to complete the agreed work.
A Product Burn Down chart is a graph that shows the Product Backlog done and the work remaining to complete the project.
The graph shows the amount of work left to finish so as to meet the product goal. The horizontal axis “X” denotes the sprints (measured in story points). The vertical axis “Y” represents the amount of work remaining in a product backlog.
The release burndown chart is a broader visual depiction used to monitor the progress of the release. This chart shows the high-level view of the remaining workload in the release. The vertical axis “Y” represents the remaining amount of work in a release in terms of story points, hours, or ideal days. The horizontal axis “X” represents the sprints.
The release burndown chart is an essential component of any agile project and is a way for the team to visually see the progress being made during each sprint. It also shows the impact on the team’s progress in the release when work items are added or removed. You can forecast when the total work will be completed based on the finished sprints.
The Defect burn down chart as the name implies gives a visual representation of the remaining amount of work from the defect backlog.
The vertical axis “Y” shows the remaining work in a defect backlog. The horizontal axis “X” represents the time measured in sprints.