measurement
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The Word “Automation” Has Led Us Astray The misunderstanding that automation for software quality is just doing what humans do (i.e., manual testing), but faster and more often, causes business risk. Unless you’re very clear, the quality measure is incomplete. The word automation distracts from the real value: measuring quality. |
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Figuring Out What to Measure: Metrics for Agile Teams For agile to work, it's important to evaluate how your team and your project are doing. Qualitative feedback, such as from reviews and retrospectives, can be valuable. But at some point you may need more quantitative information to improve your project. How do you decide what metrics to gather? |
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Make Sure Measuring Agile Metrics Is Really Leading to Improvement In your quest to figure out how your team is doing with its agile process, gathering data can be useful—as long as it does not add significant overhead to your project or get in the way of delivering customer value. Don't let the desire to quantify your improvement get in the way of improving. |
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Is Project Size Shrinking? A Long-Term Trends Report According to data examining projects completed between 1980 and 2010, project size has decreased drastically, particularly in the decade beginning in 2000. Several factors may have contributed to the diminishing SLOCs per project, or, maybe our definition of project has changed over time. |
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Estimate Effort Based on Past Performance How often have you estimated how long it would take to complete a task, only to be off by a whole week? That's because we assume we will begin the task immediately and have a forty-hour week to work on it. There's a better way: prediction based on performance. Just find a batch size for your work. |
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The Mismeasurement of Software Having participated in a number of unsuccessful metrics programs throughout his career, Lee Copeland has identified and distilled four key principles that help prevent the mismeasurement of software. Evaluate how your metrics work against these four principles. Do you need to make any changes? |
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Are Your Metrics Causing Unintended Consequences? When you collect metrics that involve people, it will change the way they behave—but not always for the better. Attaching numbers to how people work often makes them perform their work differently. Every time you gather metrics, you should try to analyze what the unintended consequences could be. |
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Using Points and Hours for Estimating Steve Berczuk writes that if you decide that there is some value to estimating, you have to decide which unit to measure with points, hours, or something else. Without estimation of any kind, it's difficult to understand how effective you can deliver. |
