How to Improve agile team efficiency

How to Improve
Agile Team
Efficiency
Himanshu Desai (@H_Desai)
Principal Consultant, Technical Specialist
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Agenda
› Measures and Metrics & their suitability
› Quality
› Velocity
› Burndown
› Burnup
› Business Value Delivered
› Cumulative Flow Diagram
› Takeaway
/ Copyright ©2015 by Readify Pty Ltd2

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Bad Metrics
› Continental Airlines example
› Reducing Fuel Consumption as metrics
› Programming Example
› When you reward programmers who write lots of
code and fix lots of bugs

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Good metrics
› Affirmandreinforceagileprinciples
› Measureoutcome,notoutput
› Followtrendsnotnumbers
› Belongtoasmallsetofmetrics/diagnostics
› "Should provide fuelformeaningful conversations"
› Diagnose&improvetheprocessesthatproducebusinessvalue
› Providefeedbackonafrequentandregularbasis
› Areeasytocollect

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Quality

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Quality
› Code Coverage
› Maintability
› Technical Debt Register

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Velocity

Page / Copyright ©2014 by Readify Pty Ltd8
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StoryPoints
Sprints
Velocity

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Pop Quiz
› Team 1
› Velocity : 50 story points
› Team 2
› Velocity: 52 story points

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Velocity
› It is not a goal
› Rate at which team can produce working software
› Factors
› Toolset
› Team composition

Goodhart's
law
“When a measure
becomes a target, it
ceases to be a good
measure.”

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Velocity – Myths
› Higher velocity is always a good thing
› Not true because….
› Techdebtisbad
› Pushingtoohardonnewproductvalueandvelocitytendstoincreasetechdebt
› Key Point : Measure and limit tech debt accumulation

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Burndown

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Burndown
› Rate at which features are completed
› Completed at sprint and release level
› Point in time measurement of amount of work left to
be done

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POINTS/HOURS
TIME
Burndown
Actual Remaining Ideal

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POINTS/HOURS
TIME
Burndown

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Burnup

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Burnup
› Same as burn-down but...
› Instead of tracking how much work is left to be done,
we track how much work is completed so the curve
goes up, not down
› Provides the visibility of scope changes.

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StoryPoints
Time
Burnup
Actual Scope

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StoryPoints
Time
Burnup
Actual Scope

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Important points
› Effectively sized and testable stories.
› Allow finishing work to end quickly
› Focus on few stories at a time, rather than work on too
much at once

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How to achieve this?
› Get the product owner to provide INVEST stories.
› Provide more visibility to WHERE work is before its
DONE
› Manage the work in progress to drive focus

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Business Value Delivered

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Sprint 1 Sprint 2 Sprint 3 Sprint 4 Sprint 5
Cumulative Business Value Delivered

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Business Value Delivered
› Assign business value to features.
› Best to assign at the epic level or group of user stories.

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Cumulative Flow Diagram

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› The idea is to visualize where the features/stories are in
the workflow across time.
› Helps you to visualize work status in more depth
› Manage the work in progress to drive focus

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StoriesComplete
Time (Weeks)
8. Done 7. Await Merge 6. Await Acc. 5. Testing
4. Code Review 3. Design Review 2. In Progress 1. To Do
WIP

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Take away
› What you don’t measure, you can not improve
› Use of burnup in conjunction with burndown.
› Spread the work evenly to reduce risk of leftovers.
› Velocity is not a goal
› Use CFD to identify bottleneck and take corrective
action

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Take away (Continued)
› Track Business Value Delivered. All features should be
quantified with business value. Aim for smaller feature
› Defects per sprint gives you an idea of how well the
sprint is going
› Don’t ignore developer satisfaction
› Pay up technical debt
› Manage code coverage

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Make it all visible

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Thank you
Himanshu Desai
Himanshu.desai@readify.net

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