5 agile metrics you won’t hate –and some anti-patterns to watch out for!

1. Use a sprint burndown report to track completion of work during the sprint.
   • If the burndown line makes steep drops, the work has not been broken down into granular pieces.
2. Use an epic or release burndown report to track progress over a larger body of work than a sprint.
   • Scope creep all the time may indicate that the product owner does not fully understand the problem that should be solved.
3. Use a velocity report to monitor how team velocity (average amount of work a scrum team completes during a sprint) and estimation accuracy evolves over time.
   • When committed work is much more than completed work for several sprints in a row, there might be unforeseen development challenges not accounted for during estimation. Check if further work break down might help.
4. Use a control chart to look at how the cycle time for stories (time it takes from in progress to done) evolve over time.
   • If the cycle time is increasing: Try to understand why during the retrospective.
5. Use a cumulative flow diagram to check that Kanban teams are having a consistent flow of work, avoiding shortages and bottlenecks.
   • If the status representing the backlog grows all the time, the product owner should invest more time in backlog refinement, removing obsolete issues and issues with too low priority to ever be done.

Read the full article: Five agile metrics you won’t hate