Measurement and Metrics

Tutorials

MA Practical Agile Measurement: Benchmarking to Chart Project Trends NEW

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.

Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

How can you compare the productivity and quality you achieve across the span of your projects—whether agile, waterfall, or outsourced? Join Michael Mah to learn about schedule, quality, and defect metric trends and how these patterns behave on real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to understand your own project trends for productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of software measurement, showing you these metrics in action. With hands-on exercises, learn how to use these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. Leverage these metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments within your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.

MH Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers

Michael Sowers, TechWell Corp.

Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—measures of product quality, defect removal efficiency, defect density, defect arrival rate, and testing status. Learn the guidelines for developing a test measurement program, rules of thumb for collecting data, and ways to avoid “metrics dysfunction.” Mike identifies several metrics paradigms and discusses the pros and cons of each.

Concurrent Sessions

AW10 Getting the Most Value from Feedback Systems: Daily, Every Sprint, and Every Release

Satish Thatte, VersionOne

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 2:45pm

Agile methods are empirical. You must inspect and adapt to make agile work. This requires using effective feedback systems which are vital to your success. Agile teams often suffer from agile feedback systems that are dysfunctional—non-existent, delayed, or no learning from feedback. Satish Thatte explains three agile feedback systems—daily, sprint, and release—and their associated value and challenges. Satish discusses how to improve these feedback systems so they are beneficial to each team member, the project, the program, and the organization. The key is to use templates that capture information and show if the double feedback loops (basic as well as learning feedback loops) are working properly, and then to leverage connections among the agile feedback systems. As a bonus, every delegate receives these templates refined with feedback by industry users during the past six years.

AT16 Using Metrics to Influence Developers, Executives, and All Stakeholders

Larry Maccherone, AgileCraft

Thu, 11/12/2015 - 3:00pm

The evening before the space shuttle Challenger exploded, a group of engineers discussed what they believed was a potentially catastrophic risk. They brought the issue to NASA’s management but failed to stop the launch. As a leader in your organization, your failure to influence may not cost lives but it could be catastrophic for your business. Metrics and data are just the “What.” You need comparisons, trends, and benchmarks to explain the “So what.” But none of that matters until it changes what your organization does … the “Now what.” This is the people side of metrics and data. Larry Maccherone shows you how to get action and behavior change from your data analysis. He describes how to steer the emotional elephant of your organization and appeal to the risk tolerance level of your stakeholders. Larry finishes with an exercise and approach to decision making that will help you avoid your own cognitive biases and those of your executives.