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Agile Demystified: 7 Metrics to Assess Your Agile Practices

Evolution of Agile Development

Agile development has evolved to become the norm for software projects. Many organizations are practicing agile with fantastic results. However, sometimes results are less than stellar.

Assess your company’s agile practices with this quick checklist. Score 1 point for every answer you agree with.

1. Number of unit tests: Increasing

Your team is checking for more and more bugs during the build. Unit tests are the best way to shift finding bugs to the left.

2. Number of releases equals number of sprints

In agile, the goal is to have a releasable product every sprint. Your team knows their definition of done and is acting on it.

3. Work In Progress (WIP) is decreasing or low

Your team rarely carries work items over from sprint to sprint and is rarely paralyzed by WIP. You know that context switches and blocked items require work that produces no business value.

4. Plan for the short term

Your team stays in the moment, avoids planning months ahead and doesn’t waste time on unnecessary features, planning and meetings. You work with your Product Owner to sequence work in iterations and use agile estimating.

5. Definition of done is improving

You know that the measure for good, complete code should always be improving. Validating features in production, additional automation, better reviews and thorough testing are among a few things that will help to drive-up your code quality, and your team knows it.

6. Technical debt is decreasing

Your team is spending time in every sprint working off technical debt to ensure a clutter-free code base. A little work along the way in each sprint pays great dividends, and it takes significant team discipline to not create tech debt in the first place.

7.  Retrospectives result in meaningful improvements

Team members feel comfortable commenting about the successes and failures of the team. You actively identify areas to improve and take the necessary actions.

Did you score a 7 out of 7 on the agile quiz?

Don’t worry if you didn’t; there’s a reason it’s called practicing agile. However, if you scored below 5, it might be time for some course corrections. Often, input from another team can help reveal those hard to find trouble spots.

Want more?

Check out our Scrum Master Check-In series and dig deeper into the Scrum Process.

Keep delivering greatness!