Choose the Right Metrics to Drive Your Agile, DevOps and Continuous Delivery Initiatives
The Metrics Framework
0. Prework
- Nominal
- Ordinal
- Interval
- Ratio
Metrics as
- A Progress Meter
- A Predictive Tool
- Solution Determination
1. Assess Your Project's Business Value and Risk Tolerance Levels
The three equally important factors that define a product's development with business value are:
- Efficacy
- Reliability
- Timing
BV metrics
- Earned business value
- Effectiveness and user experience
- Return on investment (ROI)
- User adoption
- User engagement
- User retention and churn
- User satisfaction
Project Risk Tolerance
- Systems of record
- Systems of differentiation
- Systems of innovation
2: Assess Your Culture
- Staff allocation
- Team distribution
- Team incentives and empowerment
- Employee turnover and employee satisfaction
- Fiefdoms and boundaries
- Output as a ratio of expertise
3: Assess Your Processes
General process metrics
- Return on investment (ROI)
- Cycle time
- Lead time
- Throughput/velocity
- Regulation
- Methodology
- Release success rate
- Development vs. stabilization (aka "fixes vs. features")
- Firefighting
- Feature rejection
- Feature ties to business cases
- Output in ratio to effort
- Number of steps in process requiring authentications
- Number of processes that are repeatable
- Burn down/up
Deployment-Process-Related Metrics
- Deployment rates
- Personnel necessary for deployment operations
- Emergency versus scheduled releases
- Issues related to data synchronization
- Issues related to change:
- Change issue severity
- Actual versus prescribed time for recoveries