Agile Notes (No. 4)

Every week, on Fridays, I will send out an email highlighting a concept relating to Agile/Scrum/Continuous Improvement. Here we go…..

First - I missed posting yesterday. Purely operator error. This week, we will start a new book, The ART of Avoiding a Train Wreck by Em Campbell-Pretty and Adrienne L. Wilson. ART is short for Agile Release Train and is a concept from Scaled Agile.

Business leaders/executives love their metrics. The 5 listed in the page grab above are excellent examples of how to measure your team. These can easily apply to a small Scrum team versus a Scaled Release Train that has multiple teams. Lets look at each measurement. These come from page xxiii of the Preface and Chapter 1: Ticket to Ride.

eNPS (Employee Net Promoter Score) - is pretty simple to calculate. On a scale of 0-10, where 0 is “not at all likely” and 10 is “extremely likely”, how likey are you to recommend working on this Scrum Team to a friend or co-worker? 9’s and 10’s are Promoters; 7’s and 8’s are Passives and 6’s and below are Detractors. Subtract the percentage of detractors from the percentage of promoters. You want this number to steadily increase. This is a measure of employee engagement. Do your team members like being a part of the team.

sNPS (Stakeholder Net Promoter Score) - Just like eNPS only this time measure the business owners of the members of your team and those that have a vested interest in the product you are delivering. Again, you want to see this number improving.

Frequency of Release - You want this to increase over time. Make sure to be clear about your definition of a “Release.” I say it is when you release to Production with live customers. But your mileage may vary. You may have a significant number of customers on your alpha or beta systems.

I’m going to skip Cycle Time to focus on Defects. You can certainly measure Feature Lead Time. Calculate the time it takes for a feature or to make it to production. For me, it is all about Quality Improvement and that means reducing defects especially production defects.

Escaped Defects - this is a count of the number of defects that make it to production. Track production found defects. You could track Production Defects per Release or Defects per Sprint (or PI is you are doing SAFe). I like Production Defects per Release.

Another metric to track is Test Automation. The more tests you can automate, the quicker your releases. Track Automated Tests as a percentage of Total Number of Manual and Automated tests.

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