Measurement and Control of Agile Projects
by David Nicolette

Has your organization recently adopted agile methods and now you are having concerns about the application of your traditional metrics and management controls? Or, are you considering adopting agile methods but want to know how to monitor project progress for project governance and control purposes?

If so, join agile coach David Nicolette as he delves into the world of agile metrics. Going far beyond the basic metrics and control approaches used in introductory agile training, Nicolette presents a broad range of metrics, explaining what value each brings, and how to calculate them.

Agile metrics follow some different fundamental principles than traditional project metrics: we create metrics for a specific purpose for specific stakeholders; we prepare the minimum metrics necessary to satisfy the stakeholder needs; we focus on overall success, not work activities, by measuring outcomes, not outputs or work effort; and we assess trends, not point-in-time snapshots.

By using these agile metrics, you can more accurately predict agile and iterative project completion dates, understand the return on investment from adopting agile methods, better plan your product releases, more quickly identify and mitigate business risks related to agile development, and make faster go/no go decisions around project approval/termination at iteration boundaries. You can even use these metrics to design a performance incentive programme for your project team.

Starting with why we measure in the first place, what we measure and how we prepare the measurements, Nicolette prepares the foundation with a clear understanding of why traditional metrics begin to fail on agile and iterative projects. He then goes on to explain:

• The 9 key agile metrics you should be using, including Running Tested Features, Earned Business Value, Burndown, Veolocity, Test Coverage, Budget Burndown, Story Cycle Time, and more…
• How to diagnose process problems using agile metrics
• Several examples of agile project scorecards that put these metrics into use

Purchasers of this DVD will also be able to download a number of MS Excel templates referred to in the presentation from the links below.