Leanpub Header

Skip to main content
Go to Leanpub.comLeanpub
Conflux Books

Team Guide to Metrics for Business Decisions

Chris Young and Mattia Battiston

Learn how metrics can help your software team answer questions like “How fast are we going? What should we do next? Where’s the bottleneck?” Deliver software more effectively with greater certainty.

Minimum price

$18.00

$24.00

You pay

$24.00
$

...Or Buy With Credits!

You can get credits monthly with a Reader Membership
PDF
EPUB
WEB
418
Readers
207
Pages
45,977Words
About

About

About the Book

How can software teams keep a laser-like focus on outcomes whilst improving practices and flow? How can software teams understand where the bottlenecks are in their processes? And how can software teams provide reliable forecasts of when work will be done? The answer to these questions is: software teams should use Business Metrics.

Teams that use Business Metrics understand Throughput, Lead Time, Forecasting, Flow, Quality, and Value - all measures that speak directly to business outcomes. By using Business Metrics, your software team will produce software that is more business-relevant with more certainty and less waste.

Learn how metrics can help your software team answer questions like 'How fast are we going? What should we do next? Where’s the bottleneck?' Deliver software more effectively with greater certainty.

Team Guide to Metrics for Business Decisions is the second guidebook in the collection from Conflux Books. The ‘Team Guide’ collection is designed to help teams building and running software systems to be as effective as possible. Guides are curated by experienced practitioners and emphasise the need for collaboration and learning, with the team at the centre.

Share this book

Categories

AgileLeanComputers and Programming

Feedback

Email the Authors

Installments completed

10 / 10

License

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Author

About the Authors

Chris Young

Chris has been a computerist since age 12 when he was introduced to the magic of the Commodore PET. He works with engineering and

management teams with the aim of getting the best results possible for all involved.

The role and value of metrics in this came from discovering the Lean/Kanban community around 2010 which got him measuring things in earnest.

He is an active member of the Lean/Agile/DevOps community speaking at Meet Ups and conferences across Europe including GOTO Berlin, Agile Cambridge, CukeUp and QCon.

Mattia Battiston

Mattia is originally from Verona, the city of love and home of Romeo of Juliet. He is a software developer and team leader with a great passion for learning and continuous improvement.  

His focus is to help teams strive to get better, using Kanban, Lean, Agile, and of course a lot of data and metrics.

He's been interested in everything to do with Agile since the beginning of his career in 2008. He loves attending and speaking at conferences and meetups for sharing experiences and learning from each other.

Contents

Table of Contents

Team Guides for Software

Conflux Books

Acknowledgements

Praise for Metrics for Business Decisions

Index of Case Studies

Introduction

  1. What is covered in this book
  2. All the time in the world
  3. Value, quality, & operational metrics
  4. How to use this book
  5. Get Started!
  6. Feedback and suggestions

1.Throughput: How fast are we going?

  1. Key points
  2. 1.1Why should I care about throughput?
  3. 1.2What’s the problem with velocity and story points?
  4. 1.3What is throughput?
  5. Case study: differentiating work items
  6. 1.4Use throughput for short term predictions
  7. 1.5Use throughput to validate experiments
  8. 1.6Use throughput for long term predictions
  9. 1.7Debunking some myths
  10. 1.8Public resources
  11. 1.9Get started!
  12. 1.10Summary

2.Lead Time: How long will this take?

  1. Key points
  2. 2.1Why should I care about lead time?
  3. 2.2What is lead time?
  4. 2.3Measuring lead time
  5. 2.4Use lead time to make predictions
  6. 2.5Use lead time to answer business questions
  7. 2.6Use lead time for continuous improvement
  8. 2.7Use lead time to answer “What should we work on today?”
  9. 2.8Debunking some myths
  10. 2.9Public resources
  11. 2.10Get started!
  12. 2.11Summary

3.Forecasting and Planning: When will it be done?

  1. Key points
  2. 3.1Why should I care about forecasting?
  3. 3.2The common way of estimating
  4. 3.3How long will this feature/project take?
  5. 3.4Answering business questions with probabilistic forecasting
  6. 3.5Forecasting tips & tricks: how to improve your forecasts
  7. 3.6The benefits of forecasting
  8. Case study: a better way of communicating delivery times
  9. 3.7Debunking some myths
  10. 3.8Public resources
  11. 3.9Get started!
  12. 3.10Summary

4.Metrics for Flow: Where is the bottleneck?

  1. Key points
  2. 4.1Why should I care about flow?
  3. 4.2What is flow
  4. 4.3Use a cumulative flow diagram to answer: Is work flowing well?
  5. 4.4Use net flow to answer: Is our process balanced?
  6. 4.5Use flow efficiency to improve the end-to-end process
  7. 4.6Public resources
  8. 4.7Get started!
  9. 4.8Summary

5.Metrics for Quality: How do we know this works?

  1. Key points
  2. 5.1Why should I care about metrics for quality?
  3. 5.2What do we mean by quality?
  4. 5.3Use quality metrics to identify the needs of various groups of people
  5. 5.4Use quality metrics to discover who is affected by quality
  6. 5.5Use quality metrics to identify and reduce Failure Demand
  7. 5.6Use quality metrics to tell compelling stories to the right people
  8. 5.7Debunking some myths
  9. 5.8Get started!
  10. 5.9Summary

6.Metrics for Value: Is this worth doing?

  1. Key points
  2. 6.1Why should I care about value metrics?
  3. 6.2What are metrics for value?
  4. 6.3Provide a foundation of operational and quality metrics
  5. 6.4Measure usage: is anyone using it?
  6. 6.5Use the Pirate Metrics: AARRR
  7. 6.6Make your customers part of the decision-making process
  8. 6.7Expect to keep learning and adapting
  9. 6.8Debunking some myths
  10. 6.9Get started!
  11. 6.10Summary

Terminology

References and further reading

  1. Introduction
  2. Chapter 1 - Throughput
  3. Chapter 2 - Lead Time
  4. Chapter 3 - Forecasting and planning
  5. Chapter 4 - Metrics for Flow
  6. Chapter 5 - Metrics for Quality
  7. Chapter 6 - Metrics for Value

About the authors

  1. Mattia Battiston
  2. Chris Young
  3. Why we wrote this book

Index

Contributors

About the Contributors

Manuel Pais is an independent DevOps and Delivery Consultant, focused on teams and flow.

With a diverse experience including development, build management, testing and QA, Manuel has helped large organizations in finance, legal, and manufacturing adopt test automation and continuous delivery, as well as understand DevOps from both technical and human perspectives.

Manuel is co-author of the Team Guide to Software Releasability book and lead editor for the remaining books in the Team Guide series.

Matthew Skelton is co-author of Team Topologies: organizing business and technology teams for fast flow. Head of Consulting at Conflux (confluxdigital.net), he specialises in Continuous Delivery, operability and organisation dynamics for software in manufacturing, ecommerce, and online services, including cloud, IoT, and embedded software.

Recognised by TechBeacon in 2018 as one of the top 100 people to follow in DevOps, Matthew curates the well-known DevOps team topologies patterns at devopstopologies.com and is co-author of the books Continuous Delivery with Windows and .NET (O’Reilly, 2016) and Team Guide to Software Operability (Skelton Thatcher Publications, 2016). He is also co-founder at Conflux Books which publishes books for technologists by technologists.

confluxdigital.net / @matthewpskelton

Get the free sample chapters

Click the buttons to get the free sample in PDF or EPUB, or read the sample online here

Download Sample PDFDownload Sample EPUBRead Sample OnlineRead online

About the Publisher

About the Publisher

This book is published on Leanpub by Conflux Books

Conflux Books publishes books for the global technology community from experienced practitioners.

The Leanpub 60 Day 100% Happiness Guarantee

Within 60 days of purchase you can get a 100% refund on any Leanpub purchase, in two clicks.

Now, this is technically risky for us, since you'll have the book or course files either way. But we're so confident in our products and services, and in our authors and readers, that we're happy to offer a full money back guarantee for everything we sell.

You can only find out how good something is by trying it, and because of our 100% money back guarantee there's literally no risk to do so!

So, there's no reason not to click the Add to Cart button, is there?

See full terms...

Earn $8 on a $10 Purchase, and $16 on a $20 Purchase

We pay 80% royalties on purchases of $7.99 or more, and 80% royalties minus a 50 cent flat fee on purchases between $0.99 and $7.98. You earn $8 on a $10 sale, and $16 on a $20 sale. So, if we sell 5000 non-refunded copies of your book for $20, you'll earn $80,000.

(Yes, some authors have already earned much more than that on Leanpub.)

In fact, authors have earned over $14 million writing, publishing and selling on Leanpub.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub

Free Updates. DRM Free.

If you buy a Leanpub book, you get free updates for as long as the author updates the book! Many authors use Leanpub to publish their books in-progress, while they are writing them. All readers get free updates, regardless of when they bought the book or how much they paid (including free).

Most Leanpub books are available in PDF (for computers) and EPUB (for phones, tablets and Kindle). The formats that a book includes are shown at the top right corner of this page.

Finally, Leanpub books don't have any DRM copy-protection nonsense, so you can easily read them on any supported device.

Learn more about Leanpub's ebook formats and where to read them

Write and Publish on Leanpub

You can use Leanpub to easily write, publish and sell in-progress and completed ebooks and online courses!

Leanpub is a powerful platform for serious authors, combining a simple, elegant writing and publishing workflow with a store focused on selling in-progress ebooks.

Leanpub is a magical typewriter for authors: just write in plain text, and to publish your ebook, just click a button. (Or, if you are producing your ebook your own way, you can even upload your own PDF and/or EPUB files and then publish with one click!) It really is that easy.

Learn more about writing on Leanpub