Metrics Library

The discrepancy between the forecasted revenues in either direction is a telling sign of business uncertainty. Being able to maximize the foreseeability of revenues makes running a business much more manageable.

We want to lower the risk that business will take a drastic turn from one month to the next.

The health of the product backlog ensures to maximize the value resulting from the work of the development team. Assuming you are not satisfied with the current state of your product backlog, you would like to improve on how the product backlog items are composed, how many of them are in such a state that they can be pulled into a sprint backlog and start working on them immediately.

Are you having difficulties organizing the Product Backlog? Do you want to expose the problem that too many people are trashing the list, making it unmanageable? Managing backlog becomes inefficient if there are too many PBIs, often duplicates, or just serving as a wish list.

If you feel the technical debt might be preventing you from having a faster more modular build system that is capable of integrating all pieces of needed software components into valuable product increments, then exposing this weakness might be a way leading to a more frequent conversation on how to approach to a solution.

How is the key value driver of the company developing? How much long-term value the company has created with current customer relationships?

Do your customers love the service after they try it, and do they stay engaged? By measuring customer churn, you can monitor if you are making progress in this field. The end game is to have long-lasting customer relations that yield a steady revenue stream.

Can you close or narrow the gap from what the customer expects to what the customer gets by using your product? Work with customers.

Cycle time measures your development team's ability to deliver. That is why you should constantly monitor it and its trends. If Cycle time indicates opportunities to improve, analyze other more specific metrics to decide how to proceed (e.g., Build and Integration Frequency, Release Frequency and Mean Time To Repair). Introduce improvements one by one, starting from the one with the most significant gain.

Improve the techniques of creating small enough Product Backlog Items to test them in the same cycle, thus prevent or at least decrease bug leakage. Adopting such practices is also fostering cooperation between developers and testers, preventing big handoffs.

You want to uncover hidden problems within an organization and proactively act to retain good people.

Improve the mechanics of planning sessions. If you feel the team is struggling to meet the Acceptance Criteria for Product Backlog Items on the Sprint Backlog, try to improve the trend to achieve better predictability.