Principle 7 of the Agile Manifesto reminds teams that “working software is the primary measure of progress”. Many people, though, are accustomed to project management reporting and have associated expectations of reporting on activity and milestones. Both of these provide hindsight:
Agile teams, though, tend to look at a range of other metrics:
Velocity is the most widely used metric for agile teams. It’s a very useful metric for teams to use in planning to understand their capacity and work out how much work to take on.
When used as a measure of productivity by managers, who then ask a team to “increase their velocity”, teams end up simply inflating the Story Points they assign to Product Backlog items.
Be careful how you use this metric.
If the product was deployed but not released or failed to attract users, this is recorded as a failed deployment. Sometimes, a failed deployment happens to the decisions of one of the stakeholders, or the business model proves to be unreliable.
Understanding: