Agile metrics are quantifiable data to evaluate a Scrum team productivity, predictability, and the quality: velocity, WIP, throughput, DORA
An old project management quote says “You can’t control what you can’t measure”. This is not different when you use Scrum. In this blog post, David Koontz proposes a list of metrics that can be used to assess the activity of Scrum teams.
Klaus Bucka-Lassen discusses the estimation with story points in Scrum. Story points are a different way to estimate features in Scrum. Story points are a measurement of a feature’s size relative to other features and not a measure of the time needed to complete a feature.
Developers don’t like to provide time estimates for implementing a software feature. Management, on the other hand, has a legitimate need for project management estimates. This article explains how the Scrum Agile Project Management framework provides a solution to this conflict.
The average Scrum team delivered a 35% improvement in velocity at Yahoo [1] where teams properly coached delivered 300-400% improvements. The best Scrum Master at MySpace peaked at 267% of initial velocity after 12 weeks and averaged 168% increase in velocity over 12 Sprints. Most teams were less successful.
This article discusses estimation techniques for teams that are adopting Scrum. The authors recommend to use story points during the release planning phase, but initially to switch to hours to estimate tasks during the sprint planning. Then the team will gradually move to using story points to estimate complete stories that members will commit for in next sprint.
Thom Roach shares with us in this blog post the metrics that he includes in iteration summary reports. The three main statistics he uses are Iteration Statistics summary, Iteration Cumulative Flow and Team Velocity Chart.
Mike Cohn wrote an interesting post where he discusses he allows or even encourages to estimate with story points as large as 20, 40, and 100. He explains that they are useful when you need first and not necessarily precise estimate of the general size of a new project being considered.
Scrum Expert Copyright © 2009-2026 Martinig & Associates