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

Metrics

Because “working software is the measure of progress,” it should be a fairly straightforward metric to track. We especially like the Advanced Release Burndown Chart⁵ in IBM’s Rational Team Concert^™ (RTC) for tracking completed user stories (“completed user stories” equates to “working software”—we encourage the use of a strong definition of “Done!”).

5. See some additional discussion of Release Burndown Charts in the “Breakthrough” section of Chapter 8, “Release Often.”

Apart from release burndown charts, we suggest that teams also count how many times they deployed their software in-house and compare that to how many iterations there were. Target at least one in-house deployment for every iteration. Even better, use continuous deployment ...