It will not be an overstatement to say that Agile Metricsare of great help to Agile development teams. They help measure the process of development. Also, they aid with evaluating productivity, quality of work and predictability. Even, it is possible to judge the health of the products and teams with these metrics in Scrum. The key focus of these metrics is on the value customers get. As against evaluating how much or what the teams do, they help with judging what type of impact has been created on customers.

Importance of Agile Metrics:

The whole concept of Agile relies on continuous improvement shortly called CI. Nevertheless, it is not possible to implement CI on teams. The reason is that it has to come from within. In other words, self-improvement or SI is important. Now, you can understand that Continuous Improvement is not possible without Self-Improvement.

In Agile, immediate delivery is a crucial concept. Nevertheless, you should not overlook self-improvement here. Teams that practice self-improvement give better results as compared to the teams that do not. However, having effective and sustainable self-improvement in place is not easy. It is a process that goes longer and should have a management framework in place.  Agile metrics support self-improvement. The reason is that they keep track of the team performance and the quality of software. You can consider that metrics have a straight impact on Continuous Improvement.

In Agile practices high-quality product delivery is important equally important. Nevertheless, it is hard to achieve a balance between these two. Here comes Agile Metrics that help teams to measure growth. Teams can become self-managing with Agile metrics and they can deliver value as well. Moreover, continuous improvement will become part of the workflow without much effort.

Top 10 Agile Metrics:

1. Cycle Time:

Cycle time is a metric suggested by not just Agile coaches but also Scrum Masters. This metric evaluates how long it will take to complete tasks by a team. Let us consider that you are using Sprint or Kanban board. In this case, you can measure Cycle time by keeping an eye on how much time tasks spend in the  “work-in-progress” stage. From the outcome, you can identify the tasks that take a longer time. In turn, you can work on them with your team to identify how to quicken those tasks.

From Cycle Time, you can gather a lot of information about time to feedback, delays, predictability, size of the story, cost and productivity.

2. Sprint Burndown:

Sprint Burndown is one of the popular Agile Metrics. The reason is that Scrum Teams organize their process into Sprints in Agile Project Management. Here, teams decide how much work they can complete in a Sprint before the official instigation of the project. Here, a Sprint Burndown report will help. The reason is that it keeps a watch on the progress of the work all through every Sprint.

The result is evaluated with respect to backlogs, story points, and hours. So, teams can assess their performance in connection with the parameters set.  The good thing about the Sprint Burndown metric is that it presents the outcomes in the form of a graph. In a graph, a comparison is made between the actual Scrum tasks and the estimated tasks. In turn, the performance of the teams all through the Sprint can be identified.

A couple of key parameters that Sprint burndown measures are tasks and time. When tasks are plotted on the Y-axis, time is plotted on the X-Axis. The Sprint Burndown is measured in either story points or hours. It aids with judging in advance as to whether the Sprint will be completed within the set time or not. The good thing about this particular metric is that it permits you to visualize one thing. You can know how much value a particular Sprint has delivered at any given point in time in the process. Even, it will help you judge the time required for the completion of the entire project.

3. Agile Velocity:

Among Agile project metrics, this particular metric will help with measuring how many story points were so far completed by a team. Even, with this metric, you can get to know the average work completed by the team over the last few Sprints. In turn, it will help with predicting the output of the team in the forthcoming Sprints.

This metric is powerful as it is an outcome metric. It will judge how much value was actually delivered to customers in a series of Sprints. However, in this metric, you should be careful not to compare velocity across different teams. The reason is that definition and story points can differ from one team to another.

4. Epic and Release Burndown:

In comparison with the Sprint Burndown metric, the focus of this metric is on a larger picture. With this metric, you can track the progress over a large work body. The good thing about this metric is that it will make each member of the team be aware of the workflow in the version and epic. This becomes possible with different epic and Release Burndown charts. It will show the development of the team in relation to the work for an epic. Here, epic is a larger user story that your team can break down into smaller pieces for easier completion.

5. Net Promoter Score:

Once the entire production is complete, you can use this metric as a beta test. When you do this, you can make sure whether the actual users will accept the product or project or will they reject it. Basically, among the other Agile Scrum metrics, its role is to identify one key point. It will help you know whether the project will bring the intended satisfaction to the customers. You can very well understand the importance of this metric from this particular point. 

6. Return on Investment:

You can arrive at the return on investment by subtracting the cost of the project or product from the income generated by a project or product. In simple terms, you should identify the Money In Vs. Money Out.  The thing to remember here is that in Agile projects, return on investment is different from traditional projects. The reason is that Agile projects have one potential. Yes, they can produce one income with the initial release. But, they can contribute to an increase in revenue with each new release.

In the traditional approach, you would deploy requirements. However, before deploying, you will collect, define, design, develop and even test the requirements. Let us consider that from the information gathering to the deployment, it takes 6 months. In the traditional approach, you will get to see the return on investment only after 11 months from the information gathering stage. The reason is that you will get to see the return on investment only after 5 months from deployment.

When it comes to the Agile approach, new functionality will be available as quickly as the first Sprint or iteration.  When it becomes possible to generate income right after the initial month, you can achieve the breakeven point much quicker. There will be a boost in the overall return on investment as a result. You will be surprised to know that you can expect a three-fold boost in the overall ROI. 

ROI metrics will help with justifying projects right from the beginning. So, companies can fund projects on the basis of the return potential. It will be possible to track the ROI for each project separately and even for the organization as a whole with ROI Metrics.

7. Cumulative Flow Diagram:

Shortly called CFDs, these are stacked area charts that denote the number of work items in every column for a specific period. The lowest layer in this diagram will refer to the number of items in the completed state. With this graph, you can envision project development. Even, it will be possible to visualize the probable hardships. It will show the timeline on X-axis and the corresponding backlog items on the Y-axis. Also, you can customize the flow diagram based on your project status and category.

8. Control Chart:

When it comes to Agile project management metrics, you can measure the performance of a project with control chart metrics. You can evaluate the cycle time of a particular issue using this metric. As you can divide the entire cycle time into shorter cycle times, this metric is the best option to achieve high throughput. Also, when using this metric, you can get to see the results visibly and immediately whenever a change is made. The goal of this metric is to achieve a short and consistent cycle time in a particular Sprint.

9. Lead Time:

This is one of the Agile Scrum metrics that evaluate the entire time. It will consider right from the moment a story gets into the system until it is completed as a part of a Sprint or released to customers. In short, with this metric, you can evaluate the speed of your value chain.

It is possible because this metric measures the entire time for a need to be realized and most importantly generate value. It is special because it measures the entire Agile system from one end to another. When you can bring down lead time, it means that the overall development pipeline is turning more efficient.

10. Value Delivered:

This is one of the Agile project metrics that use-value points for identifying the quality of work delivered to clients. This metric uses all dollars or points systems. To evaluate the value delivered to a client, you can divide the revenue you expect by the entire value points. You can assign a value point to each User story. As value points are allocated to different User Stories, the completion of each user story denotes better value points.

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