Five Key Numbers to Gauge your Agile Engineering Efforts

Five Key Numbers to Gauge your Agile Engineering Efforts
Jeff Nielsenjeff@jeffnielsen.com
Agile Tech DC
May 14, 2011

There are many benefits to working incrementally in short cycles . . .

. . . if you can pull it off

Agile engineering practices are supposed to enable a flattened cost-of-change curve
TDD
refactoring
continuous integration
pair programming
coding standard
automated builds
automated tests
. . .
Craig Davidson, http://www.agileadvisor.com/2009/01/yagni-and-cost-of-change-curve.html

But it’s not sufficient simply to do the practices(They’re not binary)

How do we knowhow effectivewe are atflattening the curve?

Five key numbers . . .Not intended to be comprehensive or even very scientific

Seconds
20
#1How long until you see feedback from a test after writing or changing a line of code?
16
12
8
4
0

#2How many one-line changes can you commitand push to testin an hour?Following the team’s practices, of course
20
16
12
8
4
0
Commits

The speed of the feedback affects the speed at which you can work

5
4
3
2
1
0
#3How many people on your team can explain the details of any particular section of code?

100%
#4What percentage of your team members did you pair with in the last two days?
80%
60%
40%
20%
0%

“Promiscuous” pairing speeds up communication and builds trust

#5How many manual steps does it take to get a build into production?
15
12
9
6
3
0
Steps

Higher transaction costs drive longer cycles and bigger batches

To lower the cost-of-change curve, we must lower the transaction costs associated with adding features

Make it cheaper to
Change code
Check in code
Understand the code
Communicate with your teammates
Push code to production

If we can make changes cheaply enough . . .
. . . the cost savings from quicker feedback and increased learning outweighthe costs of overhead and rework.

120
96
72
48
24
0
BONUS
What’s theaverage typing speed of the programmers on your team?

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Five Key Numbers to Gauge your Agile Engineering Efforts

by Jeff Nielsen on May 16, 2011

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