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Agile Projects Must Measure Business Value
How do you know if an Agile project has succeeded? The typical response I get to that question is a blank stare or moment of silence, depending on whether the meeting is in person or by phone. And if I do get an answer, it's usually accompanied by a "we're just starting" comment. The challenge is twofold: development organizations are notoriously weak in collecting metrics and reporting on their projects and, when using Agile processes, many teams are challenged to demonstrate if the change from traditional approaches was worth it. As IT costs and business pressures escalate, it is critical that a development shop can demonstrate its value to the business. Proponents claim that Agile processes help do this, but they must back up those claims with numbers.
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Business Value Applied: Aligning The Day To Day With Business Imperative
In an effort to justify IT investments, we have increasingly looked to quantify the "business value" of projects. While there is merit in doing this, in practice it can generate more heat than light. There is a limit to the accuracy with which we can predict the future, how much data we can collect, and the extent to which business decisions can be expressed as mathematical formulas. The result is that "business value" is neither ubiquitous language for IT projects nor an absolute measure of IT effectiveness. Still, there is value in business value: properly applied, it provides guidance for project decisions and is another mechanism through which IT aligns with business objectives.
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Keep Moving With Running Tested Features
A prime directive of agile development is to maintain forward progress. In past articles, I've talked about metrics that gauge the quality of code and design. While these metrics help guide refactoring efforts that ensure application maintenance remains easy, they don't necessarily allow us to measure our progress in terms that make sense to the business customer. A good way to measure forward progress is to know where the development effort stands in relation to the functional features desired by business stakeholders. Running Tested Features (RTF) is a way to track progress by measuring how many features pass acceptance tests. In this article, I'll introduce RTF and present some tools that can be adopted to implement an RTF strategy.
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Happy New Year! At this time of New Year's resolutions, it's common to see IT teams also starting their years with plans to improve work on their software projects. We always see the headlines about project failures and disasters; fewer companies want to risk giving away secrets by divulging details on their successes. At the end of the day, it's all about delivering value to the business. Yet only a small number of IT organizations have begun to think about their projects in this way.
