Chapter 12. Metrics

Scaling supervision using metrics is one thing; scaling results is quite another. The former doesn’t automatically ensure the latter. This chapter examines how an organization’s attitude to metrics influences agility. It first looks at some general shortcomings of metrics, dashboards, targets, and incentives. It cautions against overreliance on metrics and goes on to suggest ways to reform the metrics regime to bring it more in tune with the key themes laid out in Chapter 3.

12.1 Metrics Don’t Tell the Whole Story

Software development is a social activity. As such, it does not lend itself very well to measurements. Sure, we can measure a whole lot of things about software development, but we can never contend that a given ...

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