Agile Metrics in Action: A good how-to guide to getting better performance measurements – #programming #bookreview

Agile Metrics in Action

Christopher W. H. Davis

Manning – paperback

In the rapidly changing world of software development, metrics “represent the data you can get from your application lifecycle as it applies to the performance of software development teams,” Christopher W. H. Davis writes in his well-written, well-structured new book, Agile Metrics in Action.

“A metric can come from a single data source or it can be a combination of data from multiple data sources. Any data point that you track eventually becomes a metric that you can use to measure your team’s performance.”

The goals of agile metrics include collecting and analyzing data from almost every useful and accessible point in the software development life cycle, so team and individual performances can be measured and improved, and processes can be streamlined.

A key aspect of the data collection and analysis process is distributing the resulting information “across the organization in such a way that everyone can get the data they care about at a glance,” Davis says. He explains how and highlights some “traps” that teams can “fall into when they start publishing metrics,” such as “[s]ending all the data to all stakeholders,” many of whom won’t know what to do with most of it.

Metrics remain a controversial topic for many software developers, Davis emphasizes. So any business leader planning to rush his or her company into adopting agile metrics will need to proceed cautiously, instead. It is vital to get buy-in first from developers and their managers, he says.

“There will likely be people in your group who want nothing to do with measuring their work,” he explains. “Usually this stems from the fear of the unknown, fear of Big Brother, or a lack of control. The whole point here is that teams should measure themselves, not have some external person or system tell them what’s good and bad. And who doesn’t want to get better? No one is perfect—we all have a lot to learn and we can always improve.”

The concept of continuous development is a key topic in this book. “In today’s digital world consumers expect the software they interact with every day to continuously improve,” Davis states. “Mobile devices and web interfaces are ubiquitous and are evolving so rapidly that the average consumer of data expects interfaces to continually be updated and improved. To be able to provide your consumers the most competitive products, the development world has adapted by designing deployment systems that continuously integrate, test, and deploy changes. When used to their full potential, continuous practices allow development teams to hone their consumer’s experience multiple times per day.”

Of course, continuous development produces continuous data to measure and manage, as well, using agile metrics techniques.

Many different topics are addressed effectively in this book. And the practices the author presents are organized to work with any development process or tool stack. However, the software tools Davis favors for this book’s code-based examples include Grails, Groovy and MongoDB.

Agile Metrics in Action is structured and written to serve as a how-to book for virtually anyone associated with a software development team that relies on agile metrics. You may not understand all of the text. But if you take your time with this well-illustrated book, you can at least gain a better comprehension of what agile metrics means, how the process works, and why it is important to your employer, your group and your paycheck.

— Si Dunn