Being Agile: Eleven Breakthrough Techniques to Keep You from “Waterfalling Backward”

Metrics

Here are two rather simple metrics that you can use to see how well the team is doing with respect to embracing the principles and practices of queuing theory. The first is to track how many user stories the team has open at the end of each iteration. If the average is much greater than one, chances are the team is trying to work on multiple user stories in parallel and only occasionally getting any stories actually done. If you see this happening, recall that the best way for the team to complete its work efficiently is to try to work together on one user story at a time. Thus, in a typical team, there will be at most one incomplete user story at the end of an iteration. An incomplete story is then simply rolled into the next iteration ...