Scrum_BLR 10th meet up 13 sept-2014 - How to Measure Efficiency or Productivity of an Agile Team - Albert Arul Prakash

1. Measuring Efficiency and
Productivity of a team
Albert Arul Prakash

2. Measuring the performance
#Management is to confuse #measuring with
#acting, #targets with #performance, and
#planning with #change. #beta #stoos #agile
-Niels Pflaeging
Author of Organize for Complexity

3. Measuring number of hours
• We measure efficiency and productivity by
number of hours a team member worked.
Productivity No. hours worked

4. Efficiency of team member
• Always gauged by the amount of time taken to
complete a task
More time than planned = Less efficient
Less time than planned = More efficient

5. Hours – The Decider

6. Workaround
• Add Sponge at every stage.
• Always plan for worst day not for normal day

7. Reports

8. Problems with tradition
Individual
• Not being transparent in accepting mistakes
• Trying to defend themselves
• Finger-pointing at others
• Never trying getting help from others
• Never taking ownership
Team
• Low productivity
• Team morale
• No ownership of what they do
• Hiding the ant until it becomes an elephant
• No communication on the issues they face

9. Do we need hours
• Hours is not
used in
– Release plan
– Velocity
calculation
– Sprint planning
– Ball park
estimate

10. Measuring efficiency without hours
• Number of bugs in the
system
– QA specialist:
• How many bugs did you find
early, even before the build,
that were fixed by
developers?
• How many very critical bugs
were found after the build?
– Dev. specialist:
• How many were avoided in
the second run and fixed
immediately?
• How many were critical?
– How improved is the
turnaround time to fix a bug
during a time period

11. Measuring efficiency without hours
• Test scenarios and use cases
covered
– QA specialist:
• How many valuable
scenarios/use cases were written
to cover the story?
• How many critical scenarios were
identified and shared with others
early during the sprint?
– Dev. specialist:
• What was your contribution in
developing those scenarios/use
cases?
– How collaborative team were to
develop those scenarios and
use cases

12. Measuring efficiency without hours
• Refining
requirements
– Team:
• What is your
contribution in refining
the backlog by adding
details to the
requirements?
– How vocal the team
is?

13. Measuring productivity
• Quality of code
– How good was the code?
– What are the
improvements seen over a
period?
– How good was the code
coverage using the unit
testing?
– How productive the
refactoring effort were
during a particular timeline
– How often we refactor?

14. Measuring productivity
• Difference between Planned vs Actual stories
in a sprint
• Velocity improvements over a time period
• How collaborative and vocal the team is in
– Solving problems
– Raising issues
• What value the team brings in standup