Succeeding with Agile: Scrum Metrics

Explore burndown and burnup charts, including story point and task-level progress, to track sprint remaining work on the x-axis as the timeline and the y-axis as remaining work.

Interpret burndown charts by evaluating reliability, end state, sprint shape, and scope changes. Identify good, not-so-good, and ugly charts through practical examples and emphasis on incremental progress and regular updates.

Learn how burnup charts track completed work and how scope and progress lines reveal sprint changes, with options to plot by story points, story count, issue count, or task count.

Learn to interpret burnup charts by assessing reliability of scope and completion lines, the end point, and line shapes to distinguish good, bad, and ugly charts, including scope changes.

Compare burnup and burndown charts to decide which to use, based on tool support, scope changes, and board hygiene. Burnup reveals scope shifts that burndown may hide.

Ensure burnup and burndown charts remain reliable by enforcing sprint planning with subtasks and upfront estimates, updating status within ten minutes, and not moving unfinished items to the next sprint.

Explore team velocity and the say-do ratio, learn how to calculate velocity from completed stories or story points, and read velocity charts showing planned versus completed work.

Interpret velocity charts to assess reliability, ensure proper story point use and avoid equating points to hours or days, track scope versus completion and say-do ratio.

Learn how to calculate average velocity from the past three to six sprints, using a range like 40 to 45 and excluding exception sprints for planning future work.

Understand the Say-Do ratio, its 80% benchmark and completed over committed definition, and why velocity consistency matters more than a high ratio for sprint planning.

Adopt correct story point estimation and use separate Jira boards for each team to ensure reliable velocity charts, clean sprint starts, and timely closure per the definition of done.

Learn how release burnup extends sprint burnup to track a quarterly release, using story points or epic counts, while managing scope changes and tool limitations.

Explore cycle time and lead time as kanban metrics for scrum teams, from commitment to completion and delivery, and learn how Jira's control chart visualizes item flow.

Explore quality metrics for software teams using Scrum or Kanban, including defect leakage, defect density, and code indicators like code smells, complexity, and security vulnerabilities; understand technical debt in person-days.

Explore velocity challenges in agile teams. Compare management's productivity goals with coaches' caution and explain why velocity-based targets and individual velocity can invite mismeasurement and gaming, Jira limitations and workarounds.

Shift from focusing on velocity to a multi-dimensional performance view, using team-level outcome and output metrics—pace of completion, throughput, quality, and turnaround time.

Identify common JIRA limitations and apply guidelines using plugins and widgets. Address burndown, burnup, and velocity by plotting scope with burnup, and ensuring separate boards per team.

Learn to prioritize outcome over output and process metrics, embrace empiricism and inspect and adapt, and use reliable objective data to drive self-driven, team-owned improvements with dashboards.

Apply scrum metrics to identify useful, reliable metrics; educate the team, gain agreement, and implement metrics that help the organization without compromising psychological safety.