6 Important Agile Metrics & How To Track Them

Many of us have been on projects where no agile metrics were tracked, making it impossible to determine whether we progressed toward our goals or were more efficient over time. 

Conversely, some of us have experienced times when our agile metrics were agonized over, leading to competition between teams or forced work overtime to hit goals.

With such widely varying experiences, it’s no wonder that many teams have mixed feelings toward metrics. However, this doesn’t have to be the case. By tracking and sharing appropriate agile metrics, your team can dispel any confusion and gain visibility into the team’s progress (including any setbacks) throughout the project development cycle – and here’s how we can do it!

Why Would You Use The Agile Method?

If you saw the word “agile” in the title of this article and your eyes have already started to move on because you don’t use the agile methodology – I beg you to stop and give this article the once over. Knowing how to track with the agile method can help your workflow in the following ways:

Agile increases flexibility

Your business can use agile to quickly adapt to changes in the market, customer needs, and project requirements. With short iterations and continuous feedback, teams can respond to changing circumstances and adjust as needed.

You can experience faster time-to-market

The agile methodology emphasizes delivering small, functional increments of work regularly. With agile, businesses can get their products to market faster, reducing the risk of being beaten by competitors.

Agile teams experience increased collaboration

This methodology promotes collaboration between team members, stakeholders, and customers. Communication this way helps to ensure that everyone is aligned on project goals and that the final product meets the needs of all stakeholders.

Agile teams see improved project quality

By focusing on continuous improvement, agile teams can identify and fix issues early in development. In addition, open feedback and project transparency can result in higher-quality products and reduce costly errors.

Customer satisfaction rates increase

Agile emphasizes customer involvement and feedback throughout the development process. Constant communication and participation in feedback help ensure that the final product meets the customer’s needs, leading to higher satisfaction and loyalty.

If these reasons didn’t sway you to swap over to agile, or you already use agile (and know its many glorious ways), you can move on to some of the best agile metrics to track throughout the project development cycle.

What Agile Metrics Are and Why They’re Important

While you are plugging and chugging away with your agile process, you also need to implement and understand agile metrics to gauge the health and progress of your software development.

Not tracking metrics sets you up for many execution question marks and trouble. Tracking metrics offers insight into your business process and operations that would otherwise be impossible to obtain.

Tracking agile metrics provides information such as user feedback, code output, project timeline adherence, bug counts, cost per line of code, and cycle time – all of which give companies an idea of how quickly work can get done with the available resources and compare data to help understand how future projects could be improved on.

When used effectively, agile metrics can significantly reduce costs associated with software development while ensuring consistently high-quality products.

Defining Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for Agile Teams

When working on an agile team, keeping an eye on performance ensures that projects progress smoothly. To monitor performance, one way to track and observe is to set up agile key performance indicators (KPIs).

In a nutshell, KPIs provide a fast and efficient way to measure how well the team is performing. They give the wiggle room for your business to pivot if things are not going well or can provide assistance if additional resources should be allocated.

However, before setting any agile metrics or KPIs, you must know their differences – because they are not the same thing.

An agile metric is a quantifiable measure used to track and assess the performance of a process or system, while a KPI is a specific metric that is deemed to be critical to the success of a business or project. While metrics provide detailed information about a singular process or system, KPIs help organizations focus on the most critical areas for improvement and measure their success in achieving their strategic objectives.

So when you are sitting down to figure out what agile metrics you want to track for your project, you are typically trying to get them to fit within the parameters of your established KPIs. And what KPIs should you establish? Well, that’s typically up to you and your business goals, but if you’re looking for some KPIs to get started, we recommend you check these out.

Types of Agile Metrics To Track

The metrics below are grouped into buckets related to specific business goals. While these are not all the agile metrics you could potentially have, they provide a good baseline list to get you started. By tracking any of these metrics, your team can gain insights into its performance, identify areas for improvement, and make data-driven decisions to improve its overall efficiency and effectiveness.

1. Time-related Metrics

Metrics that measure how long it takes to complete work items, such as Cycle Time, Lead Time, and Time to Market.

2. Quality-related Metrics

Metrics that measure the quality of the work, such as Defect Density, Defect Escape Rate, and Code Coverage.

3. Scope-related Metrics

Metrics that measure the amount of work completed, such as Velocity, Burndown Chart, and Work Item Age.

4. Cost-related Metrics

Metrics that measure the cost of the work, such as Return on Investment (ROI), Cost of Delay, and Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

5. Team-related Metrics

Metrics that measure the team’s performance, such as Sprint Goal Achievement, Team Velocity, and Sprint Retrospective Actions Completed.

6. Business-related Metrics

Metrics that measure the value delivered to the business, such as Customer Satisfaction, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and Business Value Delivered.

How To Track Agile Metrics

The metric you pick from the list above will be solely based on your business goals and your framework. But, no matter which metric you decide to track, there are some best practices to remember when tracking agile metrics.

Always define your success criteria

Always define your success criteria before starting any project by setting clear goals and objectives that align with your business strategy. This provides a measurable target for evaluating the success of your project and will help ensure that you are tracking the right agile metrics.

Collect data often

Data collection is critical when measuring performance as it helps provide a comprehensive picture of what’s happening on the ground. In addition, regularly collecting data allows you to track progress and make real-time adjustments as needed.

Use the right tools

The right metrics tracking tool is essential for an effective agile measurement system. The right metrics tracking tool should have features such as data visualizations, automated reports, and real-time analytics to quickly identify trends and drill down into specific areas for improvement.

Set up a team or private dashboard

Set up a project management dashboard to understand and display your metrics in a clear and easy-to-understand format. Dashboards can be set up within your tracking tool or on your project management software. This will allow you to easily monitor the progress of your projects and see where improvements are needed.

Use the insights to make improvements:

If you set up your metrics, track the data, and then don’t use the findings to move your team forward, you are wasting time and energy. The whole goal is to use the insights gained from your metrics to make data-driven decisions to improve your team’s efficiency and effectiveness.