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Culture & Methods

Measuring Tech Performance: You’re Probably Doing It Wrong

We try our best to measure our performance, and along the way identify just the right OKRs and KPIs and ABCs. There’s no One True Metric That Matters, but there are some useful guidelines and some all-too-commonly made mistakes. Use measures that focus on outcomes, not output, and measures that optimize for global or team outcomes, not local or individual outcomes.

Dr Nicole Forsgren PhD
on Jul 22, 2018
Culture & Methods

Why Software Estimation Is More Important Now Than Ever

In a world trending away from traditional waterfall and toward agile development methodologies, it would be understandable to assume that there is no longer a need for software project estimation. However, that assumption would be wrong - estimation is still a very valuable practice, even in organizations that are dependent upon agile development methodologies.

Larry Putnam Jr
on Mar 08, 2018
Culture & Methods

Actionable Analytics for Lean Project Management

Measuring the right KPIs of your workflow is the key for implementing successful Lean project management. Applying these actionable analytics is going to help you track your team's progress towards reaching process perfection, allow you to project future performance and help you spot potential problems in an early stage.

Alexander Novkov
on Jun 03, 2017
Culture & Methods

Monte Carlo Planning Improves Decision Making

De la Maza helped a startup IPO by applying Monte Carlo to a planning problem. Learn how Monte Carlo planning provides a rigorous, quantitative account of what the future may bring. It has advantages over standard average case approaches and you can start with a simple Excel spreadsheet.

Michael de la Maza
on Mar 15, 2017
Culture & Methods

Size Estimation Approaches for Use with Agile Methods

Reifer’s software sizing survey identifies five commonly used methods for sizing agile projects along with their strengths and weaknesses. Size is used as the basis for measurement and estimation. Stories/story points is the most popular, while function points are used at the project level. Sizing by analogy, proxies, Halstead vocabulary and hybrids are used by others as the situation warrants.

Donald Reifer
on Feb 06, 2017
Culture & Methods

Q&A with Vasco Duarte on the #NoEstimates Book

In the book NoEstimates: How to Measure Project Progress Without Estimating Vasco Duarte explores how NoEstimates can help to manage projects with a focus on value and predictability, report progress quickly and often, and adapt plans constantly based on existing data.

Ben Linders
on Dec 07, 2015
Scrum Fundamentals and Advanced Live Lessons : Video Review and Interview

Tommy Norman’s Scrum Fundamentals and Advanced Live Lessons training videos help beginners to understand the basic agile and Scrum concepts. The videos run more than nine hours, broadly divided between “Scrum Fundamentals” and “Advanced Scrum”. The video sessions use animations to explain the concepts.

Savita Pahuja
on Apr 23, 2015
A Fast Story Point Estimation Process

Estimating story points can be a tedious process. So tedious in fact that some teams abandon doing story points to help predict their velocity. Instead of letting go of this valid way to predict upcoming work, how about finding a way to make the process of estimating points much faster? Not only faster, but FUN! Yes, story point estimation and fun in the same paragraph!

Mary Ann Michaels
on Apr 02, 2015
Probabilistic Project Sizing Using Randomized Branch Sampling (RBS)

Analyzing all the stories in a project requires significant time. How can we estimate the size of a project without prior identification and analysis of every single user story? If you don't want to analyze all user stories in your project in order to estimate its size then Randomized Branch Sampling is an approach you can use for portfolio related decisions and quotations on prospect projects.

Dimitar Bakardzhiev
on Mar 29, 2015
Quantifying the Impact of Agile Software Development Practices

Rally Software and Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute (SEI) are researching the impact of agile software development practices using data from Rally’s Agile Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform. InfoQ interviewed Larry Maccherone and Jim McCurley about their collaboration, measurements from the study, conclusions from the analysis and plans for further research.

Ben Linders
on Jul 03, 2014
The Original Sin of Software Metrics

This article argues it is inherently wrong to set up software metrics to try and 'improve' the software development process. Using a fictitious scenario, this article explains the reasons why it is wrong, the damages it may cause, and offers some alternatives for managing software development.

Chen Ping
on Jun 05, 2014
Your story cards are limiting your agility

Story cards are a long-established tool for keep track of requests and populating a backlog, but the current common format for storycards can lead to improper focus, improper conclusions, wasted time and wasted opportunity. With a subtle but important change to the way storycards are formatted these issues can be overcome, increasing delivery of real customer value

Joseph Flahiff
on Sep 19, 2013