Practical Metrics for Agile Teams

Team data and dashboards can be misused and cause more pain than results. Having the team run blind to its historical data though, is often worse, with solely opinions and gut-feel driving process change. Helping your teams see and understand a holistic balance of their data will give your advice context and encourage team constant improvement through experiments and reflection. 

Dashboards are about balancing trade-offs. Trading something your team is great at for something they want (or need) to improve. Having the team complete the feedback loop and confirm that an experiment had the intended impact, will process improvement be continuous and sustainable.

This talk showed how to expose data to teams in order for them to retrospect productively, determine if a process experiment is panning out as expected, and to vigorously explore process change opportunities. Recent research shows strong relationships between certain metrics to process and practices, and this session demonstrates how these metrics have and can be tied to timely coaching advice. The real-world dashboards demonstrated in this talk showed most common problems and how to avoid them with before and after shots and quotes from the teams impacted by them.