Understanding and Measuring Software Delivery Performance

Delivery lead times and deployment frequency are both software delivery performance tempo measures. Measure productivity by calculating the number of deploys per day per developer.

Velocity is a relative and team-dependent measure, not an absolute one. Velocity isn’t about measuring the team. It is about having a coarse-grained forecast. Velocity is the rate at which a team delivers value to the customer. A team that completes many tasks but delivers no value to the customer should have zero Velocity. Velocity is a measurement, not a goal.

The project is still ongoing when all the stories are implemented. The project is over when there are no more stories in the deck worth implementing. Complexity is measure base on all the factors that can change an outcome if something takes more time and is more complex.

Constant Velocity is a simple metric to tell if a code base is good enough. Constant Velocity suggests that the code is easy to change. When the team faces, a change in the code base is as easy as last time. In any application, with time, developers will find new friction points that will prevent them from moving forward. The friction is often visible in the team’s Velocity. If the velocity chart shows a consistent negative slope, the most likely cause is the quality of the code. If we see a…