Designing and implementing a measurement program for Scrum teams: what do agile developers really need and want?

Reviewer: Andrew Brooks

Agile software development relies on burn-down charts to track progress. Traditional process control, however, demands substantial measurement programs. So what are the needs and wants of agile developers regarding such programs__?__ To answer this question, a study was undertaken in a company specializing in the use of agile processes. Observations revealed several areas for improvement. For example, discipline was found to be poor in the recording of estimates and actual task times. Semi-structured interviews were held to determine areas for improvement that stakeholders could agree upon. Stakeholder votes are clearly indicated in Tables 4 through 7. The top three areas were visibility of business value (seven votes), estimation of user stories in terms of size and time (five votes), and visibility of technical debt (four votes). Figure 1 is an emergent cause-and-effect diagram for unhealthy technical debt. Increasing a team's estimation ability is the stated remedy to this debt problem. With no report of a pilot study to test the effectiveness of a measurement program, some readers would view the paper's title as misleading. No clear description is provided of estimation techniques used by the company. The reader should not have to assume that "Planning Poker" was the only estimation practice. In addition, if the mean error rate in estimation is worse than 20 percent, what is it__?__ The reader is not informed. Despite these criticisms, insights into one company's agile failings are useful. As such, I recommend this paper to agile teams and those researching agile processes. Online Computing Reviews Service