The topic of Agile metrics inevitably comes up in many situations and conversations. I have been hiring Scrum Masters lately. One of my screening questions read, "What standard metrics would you track if any and for what purpose?" I cannot tell you how many candidates mention velocity, burndown and burnup charts. Very few can reasonably explain the meaning and use for those.
So far, I hired 2 Scrum Masters whose answer to the question didn't have any of those metrics. What these two have in common was they mentioned and could talk about Cycle Time. Mind you, that was not the only reason they got the job, but it gave them an advantage over others. Rarely do you hear Scrum practitioners bringing up Cycle Time, Lead Time, Throughput, or Work Item Age. These all firmly used to belong to the Kanban world. Somehow during the Holy Scrum-Kanban decades of feud these metrics were banished from the Scrum land and forgotten by many.
Use Development for Discovery
Before you begin to build a house and break ground on the foundation you better have a blueprint and know exactly what you’re going to build. In physical construction, we really need to plan things out ahead of time to ensure that we have the right materials at hand and that things come together as we want them to.
This is a fundamental constraint of physical construction and it forces us to think about and construct physical things in certain ways. Virtual things do not have the same limitations and so in many cases, we can find more effective and efficient ways of constructing virtual things then if we were to just follow a similar plan that we would for constructing a physical thing.