Scrum is your Ally to Assess your Team’s Performance: Find Out Why

There are some agile metrics you can track to assess your team’s progress and implement improvements when needed. A good example is Scrum metrics.

With each passing day, teams need to increase deliveries, even if the time does not increase at the same rate.

To help meet this schedule, give teams more agility and productivity, and organize the scope of work, agile methodologies are adopted, with Scrum being the most used. Keep reading this post to learn about its main metrics.

In this article, you will learn the best tools to assess your team’s performance with Scrum.

What are agile methodologies?

Do you already use agile methods with your teams? First of all, it is important to know that they help IT, teams, during the execution of a project for the development of software or product. They replicate in other areas or projects to help:

  • Communication: between teams, processes and tools;
  • Practicality: smaller delivery cycles and with real-time monitoring of the teams involved;
  • Collaboration: everyone works together to achieve the best result;
  • Flexibility: Adaptations during the project and before final delivery.
  • Agile methodologies manage the production stages of a project, especially the longer ones and without deliverables. After all, every project needs a beginning and an end..

Unlike traditional methods, agile methods propose shorter development cycles. Use GitScrum Sprints, for example, for delivering results efficiently, Deliveries are well defined, focused on continuous improvement, and aligned with business objectives, with more flexibility, and room for adaptation. The best-known tools are Lean, Smart, Kanban, and Scrum.

How does Scrum work?

Scrum is one of the best-known agile methodologies, widely applied in project management and software development.

Through a framework, the project is divided into continuous delivery cycles, with pre-defined time intervals. Each cycle is a Sprint and lasts less than four weeks. The tasks that will be developed are in the Backlog, listed in order of priority.

When a Sprint ends, the team holds a meeting to validate the project’s deliverables and assess the need for adjustments. And the flow goes on like this until everything is finished.

What are the most used Scrum metrics?

Agile methodologies also use supporting metrics to assess the project and make necessary improvements. Without metrics, teams tend to react after problems have already happened and cannot continually evolve.

With metrics, teams trade the role of reaction for the power of action. That way, failures are anticipated and adjustments can be made along the way, before final delivery. Below are the main Scrum metrics:

Speed ​​(Velocity)

Considered one of the most basic metrics in Scrum, speed is used to measure your team’s ability to deliver. Typically, it is measured from the delivery of sprints, 1 to 3 similar cycles. It involves:

  • Technology;
  • Profile of each team member;
  • Experience and difficulty level of the project;
  • Time for everyone to work as a team;
  • Project knowledge.
  • One team’s speed should never be compared to another. Whenever evaluating, compare the team’s performance only with the deliverables made by the team.

Lead Time and Cycle Time

The first metric, Time per Lead, is the total time between the customer order and project delivery, that is, the time between the task being created in the Backlog and reaching the Done status. Time is counted regardless of development.

The second metric, Time per Cycle, in turn, considers the development time of a task.  GitScrum’s Boards are a good tool for organizing workflow and knowing exactly what to do next. Start measuring from Doing/In Progress to Done. It can be less than or equal to Time per Lead.

Both metrics take the number of hours or days invested to accomplish a given task within the project. They are used in conjunction with Kanban, although the greatest visibility is with Time per Cycle.

Lead/Cycle Time Manual

Most IT areas have tools that help to monitor the process. And they even generate graphs for analyzing the teams’ performance.

Delivery cycles can also be done manually, the old-fashioned way, on paper or in an Excel spreadsheet or Google Sheets.

Just simulate a sprint with deliveries on the x-axis (horizontal) and Lead Time, in days or hours, on the y-axis (vertical), for example. The lines meet whenever the delivery arrives at Done. To project the average time the team takes on deliveries, you need to figure out the longest and shortest lead times.

Burndown / Burnup Chart

Burndown and Burnup are graphs to monitor the progress of projects, taking into account three factors: time, effort, and delivery time.

The first chart, Burndown, is responsible for showing how the team handles the task flow in a Sprint. It serves to assess whether you meet or delay the deadline

The second graph, Burnup, analyzes task completion. This way, it is possible to see what remains to deliver and what stage the team is at.

There are also other Scrum metrics such as Test Coverage, Bugs, and Uptime/Downtime. They can include tracking a project’s development and/or team performance.

Ideal development line

The ideal development line is a straight line that goes from the total number of tasks needed at the start of the sprint until it crosses the X-axis at the scheduled end of the sprint, showing that there is no more work.

This row depends on estimates made during the project planning phase. If you’re just starting to implement project management methodologies and don’t have records of your team’s productivity yet, your estimates may not be very accurate.

In this case, your project’s development may appear ahead or behind schedule, however, by creating a record of each project, your forecasts will become more accurate over time.

Real development line

The development line is the portion of the graph that represents the actual progress of the sprint’s activities. This line starts at the ideal development line, and every day (or time unit that is being used in the chart) will show how many Story Points are left in the sprint.

The development line will likely not follow your chart’s ideal development line but will fluctuate above or below it. If your line is above ideal, it indicates that there are more tasks to finish at that point in time than expected.

While we expect a difference between these elements of our chart, your actual development line should never stray too far from the ideal. If this happens, there is a possibility that the forecasts made are too far from reality (with productivity both above and below the ideal), or that something happened to delay the project.

In this case, it is important to try to understand what is happening in the development of the project and adjust its deadlines, as well as the expectations of the interested parties.

The differences between Burndown and Burnup

The Burnup graph is very similar to the Burndown graph in that they both share the same objective: to present the estimated work and the progress of its development throughout the sprint.

There is a simple difference between them. The Burndown chart starts from the total work to be done and shows the reduction of this value as tasks are completed. And the Burnup chart starts from zero (on the X-axis). They completed the total work required to finish the sprint.

This difference exists only to fit your information display preference. With this information, you will be able to apply Burndown or Burnup graphics as useful management tools to efficiently avoid delays in your projects.

What advantages does the Scrum methodology bring to teams?

Thanks to Sprint and the to-do list in the Backlog, the integration of the entire team is into the project.

One knows what the other is doing, productivity increases while the room for delay decreases. As well as the risks of errors, which you can anticipate along the way.

Through agile methodologies and Scrum metrics, teams work more aligned and with more flexibility to propose alternatives. The scope of work gains efficiency and resource savings due to deliverables that tend to be more effective.

Adopting Scrum metrics facilitates the flow of projects, teams, and deliverables. Especially in the IT area, which sees its processes become simpler and more efficient.

GitScrum supports your team to better results and effective deliveries!

Set your workflow and board to guide your Agile team, assign Tasks, Subtasks and keep in charge of the whole process evolvements. Allow your Agile team to collaborate.

Reach higher levels of efficiency, productivity, and deliverability with GitScrum. Work focused on prioritizing what’s valuable and tracking your flow to overcome results.

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