PMI-ACP Tools and Techniques: Agile Metrics

[PMI-ACP® Exam Study Notes] Agile Metrics is one of the ten Tools and Techniques for the PMI-ACP® exam. The “Tools and Techniques” accounts for a total of 50% of all the questions to be found on the exam paper. According to the PMI-ACP® exam content outline, Metrics includes Velocity, Cycle Time, Earned Value Management (EVM) for Agile projects and Escaped Defects.

PMI-ACP® Exam Importance: around 3-6 questions (~5% of all questions)

PMI-ACP® Tools and Techniques: Metrics

• Metrics are measurements / calculations that reflect the performance / progress of the project
• Velocity
  • Velocity of team: the (average) number of story points the team can accomplish in each iteration used to estimate the project timeline and set expectations
  • ideally, after several iterations, the velocity will become constant / gradually increasing owning to synergy and reduced risks
    • for iteration 1, the velocity needs to be guessed based on historic data
    • velocity usually increases over the first few iterations and reaches a plateau afterwards owing to the increase in complexity of the overall product
  • velocity = the slope of a burn down graph
  • factors affecting velocity:
    • staffing (no of resources), morale and their skill sets
    • project arrangement: interruptions / multi-tasking
  • if the team meets for the first time, there is NO historical data on the velocity; the initial velocity (known as “forecasted velocity” can only be guessed based on any available data
• Cycle Time
  • Cycle time: the time necessary to get a single item of work done from start (idea) to finish (as a shippable product that delivers value)
  • reduce cycle time by shortening iteration time (breaking down task sizes), limiting WIP and reducing wastes
  • Cycle Time = WIP / Throughput (amount of output from a process)
  • Defect cycle time is the time between defect injection and defect remediation, the shorter the better
    • it makes sense to set a realistic goal for the defect cycle time (e.g. ~12 hours)
• Earned Value Management (EVM) for Agile Projects
  • Earned Value Management is a tool used in traditional project management to measure the progress (in terms of realization of values) of the project
  • In Agile, EVM is the measure of cost performance of the Agile project
    • though the estimate and actual costs (money spent) can be plotted as a S-curve graph to clearly show whether the project is under- or over-budget, it does not tell whether the progress of the project is ahead of or behind schedule
  • Value (story points and money) is calculated at the end of each iteration for work done
  • For the construction of the graph for EVM:
    • The baseline for comparison:
      • number of planned iterations in a release
      • planned story points in the release
      • planned budget for the release
    • Actual measurements:
      • total story points completed
      • number of iterations completed
      • Actual Cost (actual spending) to date
      • any story points added / removed from the plan (as Agile project requirements are ever-changing)
    • Plotting the chart:
      • x-axis: iterations / date
      • y-axis: i) story points planned; ii) story points completed, iii) planned budget; iv) actual costs
      • discrepancies between i) and ii) / iii) and iv) reflect the performance of the release
  • Formulas for EVM (not to be tested on the PMI-ACP® exam)
    • Schedule Performance Index (SPI) = Earned Value / Planned Value
    • Cost Performance Index (CPI) = Earned Value / Actual Cost
  • EVM does not indicate the quality of the project outcome, i.e. whether the project is successful or not
• Escaped Defects
  • Agile performance (on quality) can also be measure by the number of escaped defects (defects found by customers)
    • defects should be found and fixed during coding and testing
    • defects found early are much less expensive to fix than defects found late

Summary: Metrics

This PMI-ACP® Exam Study notes touches upon one of the many tools and techniques of the PMI-ACP® exam syllabus – Agile Metrics. Metrics includes Velocity, Cycle Time, Earned Value Management (EVM) for Agile projects and Escaped Defects.