Measuring Performance
We assume that we can easily know at the end of a project whether or not we've succeeded.
But throughout the duration of product development, or mid-project, is there a way that we can measure performance and have some indicators that a team is doing well?
The book Accelerate proposes 4 metrics that most reliably indicate the quality and performance of a team:
- Delivery Lead Time - measure of time from a customer request (business need) to the request being satisfied. Shorter lead times are better as they enable faster feedback and allow for more rapid course correction.
- Deployment Frequency - the frequency that teams are able to deploy to production.
- Time to Restore Service - how long it takes to respond to and deal with unplanned incidents
- Change Fail Rate - the percentage of changes that degrade service or require immediate remediation
Teams that do well on these metrics deliver more value more frequently, more reliably, with fewer bugs.
Assessing your team
With that in mind, here are a few questions you could use to get a picture of how your team is performing, and perhaps how likely the project will succeed:
- how long does it take the team to go from prioritized backlog item to live in production?
- is the team releasing frequently to production? Demos and deploying to test are important, but do not count as delivering value.
- does the team quickly resolve serious unexpected production issues (minutes, not hours or days)?
- do releases tend to introduce defects? is the bug count growing?