Measuring Agile Software Development

It’s been a while since I blogged last, but does not mean that our team is not working:) Quite the contrary.

In the last few months we were busy with the investigation of how to measure agile software development and DevOps. We have looked at the companies that are about to make a transformation from waterfall and V to Agile. We also looked at the companies that did that recently and that did that kind of transformation a while back.

We found that the information needs evolve rapidly as companies evolve.

Companies willing to transform/in-transformation focus on measuring the improvement of their operations. They want to be faster, provide more features in shorter time frames, increase the quality. They also want to measure how much they transformed.

Companies that have just transformed focus on following agile practices despite that there is no such thing. They seek measurements that are “agile”, and often end up with measures of velocity, backlogs and customer reactiveness. They are happy to be agile and move on.

However, after a while they discover that these measures (i) do not have anything to do with their product, (ii) do not really care about long-term sustainability of their business, so they look at the mature agile companies.

Mature agile companies, however, focus on the products and customers. They look at the stability of their products and on the development of their business models. They focus on architectural stability and automation rather than on velocity and story points.

I hope that you enjoy the presentation on the topic that we soon give at VESC in Gothenburg.