First of all, it’s been far too long for me writing something about metrics. It’s one of those topics in the agile community that keeps on giving ;-)
But I’ve been inspired (yet again) by an article that Anthony Crain wrote a while back on the topic. He introduced it as his QPPE Metrics Model, where:
Q – represents Quality,
P – represents Predictability,
P – represents Productivity, and
E – represents Engagement.
You can find the article here –
https://techbeacon.com/how-software-teams-can-measure-anything-qppe-metrics-model
I shared this article with my friend and colleague, Shaun Bradshaw. I’ve known Shaun for the better part of two decades and he’s my go-to guy when it comes to all thing’s metrics related. Here’s his initial reaction to the QPPE post:
My friend and colleague Shaun Bradshaw and I were coaching at a client recently. We started to have a conversation about velocity, not directly driven by the clients’ context, but simply in general.
Shaun was focused on velocity as a relevant metric within agile teams to drive conversations between teams and upper management. And I was struggling to “get there”.
Part of his focus was to create visibility around the difference between average velocity and current sprint velocity. Furthermore, the teams and management would be able to see:
- Velocity gaining stability over time (predictability, low variance)
- And increasing over time (short-term burst)
As part of newly formed and/or newly coached agile teams.
Now I really get what he was saying. And I agree that teams in these contexts should be displaying activity and behavior towards those two results.
