In the agile manifesto, a main principles is ‘ Embrace change over following a plan’. This enables the team to develop the most relevant features first, as priorities of the organization may change in an ever-changing world. While this is a great principle, it also can result in unpredictable and unmanageable teams that start many tasks, but not finish many tasks because of changing priorities.
Introducing an ISO standard for functional size measurement, next to the current team estimation methods (usually story points), results in an objective basis for comparison between teams and organizations.
Comparing Product Delivery Rate (effort hours spent per functional size unit) to a peer group selected from the ISBSG repository, allows product owners to benchmark their team’s productivity against the industry’s. Lower-than-average productivity indicates that more time than usual is spent on activities that don’t produce direct value (functionality) or that planned functionality is not completed.
Objective measurement is key, as story point metrics won’t give the insights needed, being a subjective relative effort estimation method, instead of an objective size measurement method.
For more information, please read the short report – Measuring Team Performance or see ISBSG Data Subscriptions.
