• Services
    • Digital Development
    • Quality Engineering & Assurance
    • Cloud Migration
    • Strategy
    • Experience Design
    • Data
  • Process
  • Thinking
  • Join Us
    • Careers
    • Culture
    • Events
  • Work
    • Success Stories
    • Industries
    • Partnerships
    • Technologies
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Google+
  • RSS Feed

Terms & ConditionsPrivacy PolicySitemap

Magenic
menu
  • Services
  • Process
  • Work
  • Contact

Should you trust those agile charts?

February 8, 2018 // By Michael Dougherty

The following article was originally published on CIO.com and can be found here.

Most CTO's and IT leaders have received the agile message by now. Your staff tells you about agile and this "scrum" thing from your IT department and they say agile has taken over the development world. They then show you all these pretty graphs with sprint burn down charts, cumulative flows, velocity over time, MVP (Minimum Viable Product) burn down charts, release burn up charts, etc.

Everything looks stellar, but when you start asking about how those charts are measured, it will often lead to one ambiguous destination: story points. First, as a disclaimer, there are other units of measurement that are available to track progress including (but not restricted to): hours, ideal days, duration, T-shirt sizes, % stories/PBI's complete and you could theoretically use bananas as a unit of measure, but it is not recommended. Naturally, you must choose something to track progress.

Naturally, your research about story pointing results in a series of explanations and diverse opinions from sources like Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat software, Scrum Alliance, and even Wikipedia under scrum and planning poker. You hear that story points are a relative unit of measure and can vary from project to project and even from team to team. If you are interested in measuring and tracking story points consistently, please read my "Story point normalization - what's the point?" article. However, my aim for this blog is to answer two questions:

  • "What work should be story pointed?”
  • “Should I trust those charts?”

Not such easy questions as one may think. This blogger has seen a myriad of responses and they rarely align between people unless clearly articulated in detail. For the first question, my simple response is, "All work delivered by the development team.” Moreover, all stakeholders that contribute and review delivery progress must have a shared understanding of tracked work.

The three pillars for scrum delivery are transparency, inspection and adaption. Only through transparency can we have clear inspection and effective adaption. What work should be story pointed to create transparency when showing those pretty charts? In an ideal setting, all work that takes time to complete. Take this table for example:

The recommendation? Expose all work in story points that are relevant to tracking progress and if they change, require action to correct. As a start, point the first two groups and track the other activities to ensure they support the flow of user stories (i.e. the “delivery fuel”) and quality validation (i.e. “fit for release”). Communicate to all involved in story pointing practices to ensure consistency in report building. The best reports follow the CASH principle.

Reports are:

  • Comparable – Measured over time to itself or to a clear goal
  • Actionable – A change in report results lead to clear actions required
  • Simple – Kept to only a small set of variables, otherwise it is too complicated to understand and react to
  • Honest – The report does not hide information, skewing the truth in delivery

So back to the second question, “Should you trust those charts?” Yes, you can trust those reports under the CASH principle, but always inspect whether those reports are truly following this principle through inspection and adaption.

Note that based on your journey in agile maturity, tracking all work in story points become less and less relevant, so you can remove pointing for work as long as there are no negative side effects (i.e. missing releases, commitments, etc.) The team frees that time in tracking story points to focus on core product development as trust builds from self-organized teams delivering quality products. Your charts will transition into more cumulative flows and User Stories completed over time. Be careful to stay conservative with changes since many lose track of their effectiveness and efficiency as the team may become complacent.

As leaders in your organization do not request, but demand reports that follow the CASH principle, so you have a clear representation of story points in your delivery portfolio. Those "hidden story points" will end up impacting deadlines, missing commitments and causing teams to burn out, attempting to keep up with more than what they have really committed.

Categories // Agile
Tags // Agile Development , IT Leadership , Analytics , Metrics
SHARE:
THE LATEST:
  • FEBRUARY 12, 2019 // blog
    Maybe My Mom Wasn’t Right – A Dirty Room for Automation
  • FEBRUARY 8, 2019 // blog
    Security In Five Bi-Weekly Roundup – 2/8/19
  • FEBRUARY 8, 2019 // blog
    Automation Execution – Here There Everywhere
Featured Content:
  • White Paper
    Stay Ahead of the Curve: App Dev Trends Coming In 2019

related Posts

FEBRUARY 7, 2019 // Agile // Blog

Kickstart the Project-to-Product Evolution in Your Org

JANUARY 22, 2019 // Agile // Blog

Agile and cloud development trends to watch in 2019

SEPTEMBER 26, 2018 // Agile // Blog

A New Approach in Managing Your Application Portfolio

JULY 31, 2018 // Agile // Blog

How to Build a Roadmap to Application Modernization

Contact Us

For more than 20 years, Magenic has helped some of the world’s best and biggest companies create innovative digital products quickly and seamlessly.

We move fast, look forward and collaborate with clients to get them to market sooner. Find out how we can help you Fast Forward to success.

This field is required
This field is required
This field is required
This field is required

Thanks for Contacting Magenic

One of our experts will be contacting you directly within the next business day.

Return To Home
Magenic

info@magenic.com+1.877.277.1044

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Google+
  • RSS Feed

© Magenic Inc.Privacy PolicyTerms & ConditionsSitemap