Speaker: Joel Tosi @jdojoandco
For more, see table of contents
General
- Finishing on time doesn’t matter if do wrong thing
- Can’t just say happy; need to know how much costs
- Who cares about metrics: managers, product owners
- People tend to measure what is easy to measure
- Goal is to make people happy (and make money)
Bad metrics
- # people trained as measure of agile transformation
- measuring just a piece. Doesn’t matter how fast deploy if deploying wrong thing. Sub-optimizing
Simple metrics
Good place to start if have no metrics now. (but not always good metrics)
- Number of defects
- Velocity
- Lines of code
- Number of teams (not x% transformed b/c y teams have done it)
- Code coverage. (bad if game system: ex: tested all getters/setters to increase)
Notes
- Easy to collect
- Doesn’t tell customer impact, right or usable
- If don’t have insight, can help
Directional Metrics
Take time to capture
- Increase in code coverage
- SQALE (from Sonar)
- Reduction in % of defects
- Cycle time
- Deployment frequency
- Average time a bug takes to get fixed
- Number Checkstyle violations over time
- Size user base
Notes
- More sustainable. Ensures not killing team in meantime
- More depth
- Still not measuring impact to users
Impactful/Economic Metrics
- Reduction of cycle time for a delivery that mattered
- Systemic cost reductions
- Stopping bad ideas
Notes
- How do we get rid of noise in the system
- People need to agree to do these types of metrics
- Need psychological safety. Must be safe to be wrong
Process Behavior Charts
- You deliver value with a system.
- A stable system will continue to deliver outputs within a range if you do nothing different.
- Goal is not to react to noise.
- Process Behavior Charts help separate signal from noise
- Need to understand what measuring
- Chart data in a time series
- Calculate the moving average
- Calculate the upper/lower bounds by multiplying by 2.66
- Introduce change and continue to measure
Supporting Knowledge Work
- Better decisions if faster access to info
- Onion – team, manager(s), business, execs. Who can answer a question. How many levels need to go through
Books
- Measures of Success: React Less, Lead betteer, Iprove More – Mark Graban. Covers health care.
- Understanding Variation – The Key To Managing Chaos – Donald J Wheeler. Explains why 2.66 and more complex charts
- Principles of Product Development Flow – Donald G Reinertsen
My take
Good talk. I like the interactivity to supplement the slides. I was thinking it would be more concrete. But I liked what it was actually about. I hadn’t seen process behavior charts before and found that particularly interesting.