Software Project Metrics
From AgileOpenNorthwest
Contents |
Summary
Carlos Sirias from the outsourcing company based in Costa Rica Pernix presented his worked on an endeavor that took his team almost two years on a quest to find a common set of metrics for Agile and Waterfall projects while he worked at Hewlett-Packard. He first started involving the audience on defining the challenges on a big company such as HP with a mix set of projects that need to be assessed by upper management to take informed decisions. The session is based on the following article
Challenges
The audience documented the following challenges
- What we measure? (performance vs progress)
- Why we need them? (help us improve)
- Who consumes them? (in Carlos's case upper management VP level)
- Too many metrics... is that a problem?
- Gaming the System... once you know what is being measured you can fool it.
- Difficult to get them? (a use of an integrated Application Lifecycle Management tool helps)
- Taking Action?
- Who created them?
- Garbage in / Garbage out
- Waterfall vs Agile
What we did (my war story)
After defining the challenges, Carlos took the audience through his personal experience and show them what his team did for their specific environment, reminded them that the product was already being used as a pilot on an organization of 5000 employees (HP IT)
After too much deliberation and research his team settle for the following metrics (which by no means are perfect but worked on his environment)
Effort
Defined as the "total amount of time for a task that results in a work product or service". We decided to measure Planned Effort and Actual Effort and in order to measure the impact and flexibility (or agility) of projects decided to roll up the metric by accumulating time on each development phase (Waterfall projects have a big up front Analysis phase while Agile one's spread it across the project) The max amount of time for a task was settle in 20hrs.
Productivity
How many simple tasks can be delivered by day ... we even came up with some sort of formula and metric... which is analyzed on the article.
Quality
We settle for a measurement of defects per phase, which not to our surprise proof that Agile projects have show more defects upfront than Waterfall
