Category Archives: Agile Metrics
Forecast Says: Your Forecast is History
You may have a well-articulated, strategic roadmap BUT how, when and what value you deliver against that roadmap can fluctuate. A benefit of iterative delivery and deliberate learning cycles is that product teams can tweak or radically change output based … Continue reading
Must-Haves for Agile Contracts
Agile contracts are a hot topic. In our recent thought paper, Sourcing for Agile, we discussed the challenges of sourcing software development services where speed and agility are key, and we discussed different management and agile development methodologies that have been tried … Continue reading
PMI-ACP Exam for Agile Project Management
PMI… Those three letters strike fear into most project teams. I do not fault you for imagining an environment that’s heavy on process, rigid and poorly prepared to adapt to the changes common in software development projects. Times are changing, and … Continue reading
Using Velocity to Make Smarter Management Decisions
On agile projects, we use a team’s historical velocity to help us plan for how much work they can get done in upcoming iterations. Velocity is the rate at which a team is able to deliver software in a period … Continue reading
Estimation in an Agile Organization – A Barometer of Dysfunction?
Estimation in agile organizations still seems to be a pretty hot topic. I was reading a recent post by Mike Cohn on his blog about it. Mike states: “Because I’m so interested in estimating and planning, I always take notice … Continue reading
Why I don’t like the metric system
I like to get involved in the various agile development discussion groups. These groups tend to provide a ton of insight into how to make extreme programming, scrum, or any other flavor of agile development that much more than “by … Continue reading
What’s in an Agile Dashboard?
Burndown charts offer tremendous insight into the likelihood of success of software releases and iterations. But are they enough by themselves? For some teams, the answer may be yes, for others, the answer is not quite. To start, many agile … Continue reading
Agile Burndown Charts
A burndown chart is an incredibly powerful, and maybe even more important, simple agile tool for measuring and managing project progress. Visually, a burndown chart is nothing more than a line chart representing remaining work over time. Burndown charts are … Continue reading
Can Gantt Charts be Agile?
Project managers love their Gantt Charts. For years, we were asked to deliver a Gantt Chart for agile development projects. Resisting each time in the name of everything agile, our internal name for a Gantt chart had previously been a … Continue reading
Five Myths of Agile Development: Myth #3 – Agile is Not Predictable
Yesterday’s post in this series discussed Myth #2 – Agile Teams Do Not Plan . Now let’s continue with Myth #3 – Agile Development is Not Predictable. As with planning, agile development methods promote a fundamentally different approach to metrics … Continue reading