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Daniel S. VacantiActionableAgileTM
[email protected] @danvacanti
Actionable Agile Metrics for
Predictability
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“When will it be done?”
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“When will it be done?”
Date (number of days)
Elapsed Time
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“When will it be done?”
Date (number of days)
Story Points / Velocity
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Stop me if you’ve heard this
one before…
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“Relative Complexity is the
best predictor of how long it
takes an item to complete”
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Why do we even bother with
Story Points?
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I’m going to suggest something
radical…
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As an example:
How long does it take you to get
to work in the morning?
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4 4 2
Active Done
Testing DoneDoneActive
DevelopmentReady Analysis
3
Here’s a spot!!
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Try an experiment for
me…
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Calendar Time
Elapsed Time
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Try the same thing
for your process
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Backlog Analysis Develop Test Deployed
Start Timer Stop Timer
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This chart is called a (Cycle Time) Scatterplot
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If you track nothing else, track the
date that an item starts and the
date that an item completes
(for all work items)
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That will give you a
measure of the flow
metric of
Cycle Time*
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Cycle Time is the
amount of
elapsed time
it takes for a given work
item to complete
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“When will it be done?”
for a single item is best
answered by
Cycle Time
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How does generating a chart like this help us
answer “When will it be done”?
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How do we make sense of this randomness?
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Your process is “random”.
Therefore, you can’t think
deterministically.
You need to think
probabilistically.
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What does it mean to
think probabilistically?
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Let’s try another experiment…
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Thinking probabilistically means
acknowledging that there is
more than one
possible future outcome
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How many people can we “expect”
to be standing after 3 flips?
12.5%
Does that mean 12.5% was the
only possible outcome?
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Backlog Analysis Develop Test Deployed
2
Start Timer Stop Timer
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Backlog Design Develop Test Deployed
2
Exactly
this dot?
Exactly
this dot?
Or Exactly
this dot?
Will Item #3
end up as…
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Backlog Design Develop Test Deployed
2
There is more than one possible outcome
for Item #3 while it is sitting in the backlog
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What are the possible
outcomes?
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How do we make sense of this
“randomness”?
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50th Percentile = 6 days or less
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85th Percentile = 15 days or less
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95th Percentile = 22 days or less
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50th Percentile = 6 days or less
95th Percentile = 22 days or less
85th Percentile = 15 days or less
Scatterplot Percentiles (making a forecast)
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85th Percentile = 33 days or less
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85th Percentile = 13 days or less
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What factors
affect
Cycle Time?
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Avg Cycle Time = Avg WIP
Avg Throughput
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Poor Pull Policies,
Blockers,
External Dependencies,
…
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“Actionable Agile
Metrics for
Predictability”
https://leanpub.com/actionableagilemetrics
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What does a 19th century
Yorkshire cotton
industrialist have to do
with the Manhattan
Project?
For next time…
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QUESTIONS?
Daniel S. Vacantihttp://www.actionableagile.com
[email protected] @danvacanti
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All charts created by:
Thank-you!