Metrics Cheat Sheet
2 minute read
Organizational Metrics
These metrics are important for teams and management to track the health of the delivery system
| Metric | Meaning | Goal of Measuring | Guardrail Metrics |
|---|---|---|---|
| Integration/Merge Frequency | How frequently code changes are integrated to the trunk for testing | Reduce the size of change to improve quality and reduce risk | Defect Rates should not increase |
| Build Cycle Time | Total duration from commit to production delivery | Improve the ability to deliver changes to improve feedback and reduce MTTR | Defect Rates should not increase |
| Change Fail % | The % of production deploys that are reverted | Improve the upstream quality processes | Development Cycle Time should not increase |
| Code Inventory | Lines of code added or removed that have not been delivered to production | Reduce the amount of code inventory and move closer to Just In Time delivery. | Change Fail % & Defect Rate should not increase |
| Defect Rate | Number of defects created during a set interval | Improve the quality processes in the delivery flow | Delivery Frequency should not reduce |
| Development Cycle Time | Time from when a story is started until marked “done” | Reduce the size of work to improve the feedback from the end user on the value of the work and to improve the quality of the acceptance criteria and testing | Defect Rate should not increase |
| MTTR | The time from when customer impact begins until it is resolved | Improve the stability and resilience of both the application and the system of delivery | Quality should not decrease |
| Delivery Frequency | The frequency that changes are delivered to production | Reduce the size of delivered change, improve the feedback loop on quality and increase the speed of value delivery. | Defect Rates should not degrade |
| Work in Progress | The number of items in progress on the team relative to the size of the team | Reduce the number of items in progress so that the team can focus on completing work vs/ being busy. | Delivery frequency should not degrade |
Team Metrics
These metrics should only be used by teams to inform decision making. They are ineffective for measuring quality, productivity, or delivery system health.
| Metric | Meaning | Goal of Measuring | Issues with Metric |
|---|---|---|---|
| Code Coverage | The % of code that us executed by test code | Prevent unexpected reduction of code coverage. Find code that should be better tested | When coverage goals are set, can generate tests that meet the goals but are ineffective as tests. |
| Velocity/Throughput | The average amount of the backlog delivered during a sprint by the team. Used by the product team for planning. There is no such thing as good or bad velocity. |