Measuring your success

One of the core concepts of effective Agile methods is to continuously improve how you perform your work. This can be done to improve quality or to get something done more quickly. In order to improve how you work, you need to know how well you're doing now. That means applying metrics to identify opportunities for improvement and then changing what you do or how you do it. Metrics are a general measurement of success in either achieving business goals or complying with a standard or process. A related concept, a Key Performance Indicator (KPI), is a quantifiable measurement of accomplishment against a crucial goal or objective. The best KPIs measure achievement of goals rather than compliance to a plan. The problem with metrics is that they generally measure something that you believe correlates to your objective, but not the objective itself. Examples of this from software development include the following:

Consider a common...