Tools & Metrics

Introduction

The tools and metrics section looks at:

  • Tools that assist the tracking and reporting practices.
  • Quantifiable measures to evaluate team performance, product performance, etc. and whether value is being delivered.

Outcomes to be Addressed by Section:

A consistent level of quality by introducing quantifiable measures and customer feedback loops.

Tools

JIRA

What?

  • JIRA will help teams to plan, track and release products.
  • Create user stories, issues, plan iterations and track tasks across all feature teams.
  • Prioritise and discuss feature team’s work with complete visibility.

Why?

  • Enables the feature team the flexibility to plan in a way that works for the team.
  • Supports estimations the use of story points, t-shirt sizes, etc.
  • Ensure stories that deliver the most value are at the top.
  • Provides the feature team and other stakeholders with transparency and ensures that everyone is on the same page.
  • Extensive reporting functionality gives team critical insights.

Who?

  • Country and Centre resources can log requirements on JIRA.
  • Feature teams can track progress.

Confluence

What?

  • Create, organise and discuss work with your feature team.
  • Create analysis deliverables that are relevant to the feature team.
  • Enables stakeholders to give inline feedback and pinned comments to track changes.
  • All analysis information are centralised.

Why?

  • Create, share and discuss products’ information with your feature team and it is accessible by any relevant stakeholders.
  • Automatic versioning, instant previews, full-text search, and pinned comments make it easy to manage your files.
  • Central point of truth if members of the feature team are not co-located.

Who?

  • Feature team especially Business Analyst will be responsible to capture information about the product.
  • Accessible by any relevant stakeholders.

Burn Down Chart

What?

  • Burn down chart is used to track and communicate the progress of projects.
  • The chart shows how much work is remaining to be done in the project.
  • Shows peeks and troughs so that teams can implement measures to improve their consistency of flow.

Why?

  • Visually compare the actual velocity against the velocity required to meet a deadline.
  • Shows the impact of decisions.
  • Manages expectations by providing useful information on time required for project.
  • Early indicators if a project is not going according to a plan.

Who?

  • Feature teams
  • Release Train Engineer

Burn Up Chart

What?

  • Burn up chart is used to track and communicate the progress of projects.
  • The chart shows how much work has been completed and the total amount of work.

Why?

  • Communicates important information that is crucial in diagnosing and rectifying problems with a project.
  • Scope creep problems are made visible to the relevant stakeholders which will help stakeholders to only request necessary projects.

Who?

Stakeholders interested in progress.

Metrics

Return on Investment (ROI)

What?

Evaluates the effectiveness of an investment or to compare the effectiveness of a number of investments, e.g.. size of story vs. the value of the story.

Why?

  • Helps instruct stakeholders to which investments are preferable to others, e.g. positive ROI or opportunities with a higher ROI.
  • Helps identify quick wins if a item is small effort for similar value of a large story.

Velocity

What?

  • Velocity is the average amount of work the development team completes within an iteration.
  • It is either measured in story points or hours, and is used for forecasting.
  • The Product Owner can use velocity to predict how quickly a team can work through a product backlog.

Anti-patterns

  • When velocity is erratic over a long period of time, always revisit the team’s estimation practices.
  • Velocity is not comparable with teams as each team sizes and write user stories differently.