Eddie is an agile coach who has been working with Agile since 2004 using XP, Scrum, Lean, Kanban & Scaled Agile. He coaches teams, scrum masters, product owners, leaders, coaches, organisations and little humans. He likes teaching agile with Lego & games and is also co-founder of the LeanAgileBrighton conference.
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Eddie Kenny is talking about
The Metric In The Middle
Can you measure the success of your agile transformation?
Yes, No, Maybe, I don't know, can you repeat the question?
This session tackles the prominent question in every company that goes agile.
"How do we know this is working?"
Metrics and measurement are becoming their own little industry within large organisations. We can measure pretty much anything but that doesn't mean we should.
Agile coaches will often face these dreaded questions:
- when will we be agile?
- Are we agile yet?
- How agile are we?
You might as well ask how long a piece of string is right?
Before providing metrics for agility, surely we need to agree on what we mean by agile.
One thing we do know is that agility doesn't happen overnight but in the meantime we feel pressure to show progress. We provide flow metrics, team happiness metrics, code quality metrics, automation metrics, productivity metrics etc.
I'm not saying these are bad, they are useful for letting us know how we are trending on certain aspects of delivery and execution.
However, the fatal flaw is that they do not measure delivery itself, which let's face it is probably the main reason we are going agile in the first place.
Many metrics are leading indicators that we are heading in the right direction but, they do not tell us if we are delivering software more frequently and surely that is one of the key indicators of whether or not we are "agile"?
If we can release frequently we can change direction quickly, we can move quickly. So, for me, there is one simple, quantifiable, metric that rises above all the others ... RELEASE FREQUENCY.
In this talk I explore the benefits of focussing on release frequency as THE CORE METRIC that tells us if we are becoming more agile.
Key takeaways…
- An understanding of primary and secondary metrics depending upon what your agile objectives are
- An appreciation of how some standard metrics are actually in service of getting to a state of increased release frequency
- An appreciation of how some other metrics only really come into play once we have established an ability to release frequently