2 weeks ago was another XPBE meeting, this time hosted by the ERG Group. The subject at hand was ‘Management Metrics’.

I didn’t quite know what to expect first, but thankfully Pascal Van Cauwenberghe gave a small introduction first (he also led the entire workshop). We were to conduct a workshop created by Jason Gorman and Duncan Pierce.

We were separated into 4 teams, each team had someone from the ERG group. Our assignment was to find a metric to measure something that the ERG group wanted to measure on their projects. To be more specific, the team I was in had to find a metric to measure the velocity of the development, analyst, test and support team.

In the following rounds we had to:

• make a list of possible metrics
• choose one metric and present it to the other groups
• every group passed their sheet with their metric on it to the adjacent group
• each group had to find ways to ‘cheat’ the metric; to still look good when measured by the metric, but not actually doing a good job/not doing much effort
• each group got the chance to improve their metric

For example, we chose the number of use cases completed/fixed time-span as a metric to measure the velocity, this could be cheated by increasing the granularity of the use cases, or by developing half-assed use cases (which raised the problem have not having acceptance criteria of use cases going from dev to test). We improved our metric by giving use cases cost points, and measure the #cost points/time completed.

What did I learn from this?

• you got to think about what metric to use to measure something
• every metric can and probably will be cheated by some people, so don’t spend to much time on designing your metric to counter this
• you almost always need more as one metric
• don’t be afraid to use qualitative metrics (customer satisfaction, fun, ...; as opposed to quantitative metrics)
• XPBE meetings are jolly good fun and very educating!

Thanks to Pascal for sending me his powerpoint he used on the meeting so I didn’t make any flagrant mistakes and so I could credit the right people