Highly productive software development metrics must first start with clearly defined collected metrics, both what to use and what not to use. To execute most projects, you might not need more than three major software development metrics to guarantee success
In choosing metrics, it is of utmost importance to determine a clear management goal. You must lay out a definite target of what you seek to accomplish. This is determined by considering only vital aspects of the operation. It helps to increase velocity and reduce effort being channeled towards unnecessary courses
It is very important to collect data from the onset because failing to generate KPIs to determine speed might limit productivity. Your goal might be effective team productivity, enhanced short learning curves, or fast productivity, etc. in order to avoid having unusable reports, but it’s filled with nice charts and stats. Let the data you collate and report accurately represent your goals.
To manage tasks, you can decide to use a SCRUM-driven tool, either Trello, Redmine, JIRA, etc. You will gain access to regular agile metrics by using any of these tools. These include Cumulative Flow diagrams, Velocity, and Sprint Burndown charts. You can also decide to make use of custom metrics designed by you or your team depending on the type of project at hand
Two Custom Metrics Created for the Aim of Archiving- Estimate Precision and Learning Curves.
Estimate Precision – This is to discover how precise the team’s estimates are. This is specifically important in a project because the client is extremely data-oriented and when the manager wants to make sure the schedules his team is committed to, are realistic and achievable. The team needs to understand the trend of estimate gaps to ensure they were getting better at predictions
Learning Curve – This is to calculate when a new member of the team is fully active
One challenge with this project is the reduction of ramp-up time though, the team tried as much as possible to avoid rotating team members across projects
In this project, a team of five developers was assigned for around six months. With cases like this, there is a high chance the team would be bringing in a new developer halfway through the project
They had to enact a rule. If the new developer doesn’t reach the pace of previous developers within 1 Sprint, they will reassign him/her to something else. Then the ramped person would be brought back (i.e., if the original team member was sent to do something else)
It needed to be measured accurately, and time measurement for the learning curve also needs to be defined. This resulted in tickets being classified on a complexity scale from 1 to 5, and, as early as the very first Sprint, they defined a baseline. They also calculated the number of points solved per developer (number of tickets closed x ticket complexity)
Whenever you open your management tool for a project, though it might consist of beautiful pies, bars, and trend charts, take a few moments to think because most of them may not be usable
Choose only the metrics that can deliver valuable data, and are tied to your major business objectives