Update: In early 2022, a product reboot has happened, which pivoted the product much more towards setting goals (OKRs) but still has its roots in teamwork, metrics, and evidence-based management.
We just released another increment! You could play with only one predefined Product and one predefined Team until now. That would cover only tiny software shops. With this release, a podium is set for larger organizations that create many products and have more teams working on those products.
The groundwork for creating an aggregate, holistic view of how the teams, products, and the whole organization is progressing is now well underway. Linking users to teams is in the pipeline.
Three new metrics are also available in the Time to Market Key-Value Area: Lead Time, Cycle Time, and Release Frequency.
Lead Time
Lead Time measures the product team's time to deliver validated requirements to customers.
Cycle Time
Cycle time is the elapsed time from the moment a Product Backlog Item (PBI) is started until the work item is finished. Cycle time represents the elapsed time from the moment the team begins developing a vertical slice of functionality until that slice meets the Definition of Done and Acceptance Criteria.
Release Frequency
Organizations that have adopted agile software development are seeing much higher quantities of releases. With the increasing popularity of agile development, a new approach to software releases known as Continuous delivery is influencing how software transitions from development to a release.
With these three new metrics, the Time to Market sub-dashboard looks like the image below, but with the introduction of the goals, the sub-dashboard will not be the same for every organization as teams will be choosing their set of metrics. The sub-dashboard will show a union, an aggregate across all teams and products.
Time to Market sub-dashboard
Agile Tools will have an educational value by having a description of each metric. Later on, the relationships between them will also promote the usage of a balanced set of them.
Goals
We will focus now on one major feature, and that is – setting goals!
The whole point of measuring is to get better at what you are doing.
One goal per team, one goal per product, and one per organization. Each of them – per quarter.
Each team will select their metrics, and we can not stress the importance of this enough! No command-and-control paradigm here where managers select measures for their subordinates. Also, a safe environment is a must.
The metrics are here to bring the attention of a team to start discussing possible techniques for improvement.
Setting goals and utilizing proper measurement techniques is the How part of the Agile journey your organization is or will be on.
Update: In early 2022, a product reboot has happened, which pivoted the product much more towards setting goals (OKRs) but still has its roots in teamwork, metrics, and evidence-based management.
