Professional Documents
Culture Documents
11 Scrum Metrics and Their Value To Scrum Teams
11 Scrum Metrics and Their Value To Scrum Teams
How scrum framework events can be used to glean important information about team
progress
4 scrum metrics that can help measure delivery to customers
4 scrum metrics that can help measure team effectiveness in meeting business goals
3 scrum metrics that can be used to measure team and process health
Which metrics to use to report to stakeholders
The missing metric in scrum development projects: software quality
What is Scrum?
Scrum is an agile methodology for managing development projects. It uses the concept of time
scoping to structure and estimate work. A scrum team operates in small increments called sprints,
usually between 1-4 weeks. The scope of work is defined according to how much the team feels
it can achieve within one sprint. In each sprint, the work delivered should be ready to be
delivered to customers.
Sprint planning—A meeting at the start of a sprint where high-level story descriptions are
broken down into detailed tasks. Provides a detailed estimate for the scope of work that can
be produced during the sprint.
Daily scrum—A daily stand up meeting in which team members share progress and
problems they are facing. Provides reporting about hours remaining for sprint tasks, which
helps generate the sprint burndown metric.
Sprint retrospective—A summary meeting at the end of the sprint to share what went well,
what went less well, and ideas for improvement. Provides qualitative information that can
help assess the health of the scrum team and the process.
To measure deliverables of the scrum team and understand how much value is being
delivered to customers.
To measure effectiveness of the scrum team; its contribution to the business in terms of
ROI, time to market, etc.
To measure the scrum team itself in order to gauge its health and catch problems like team
turnover, attrition and dissatisfied developers.
https://www.sealights.io/software-development-metrics/11-scrum-metrics-and-their-value-to-scrum-teams/ 1/5
03/10/2023, 10:55 11 Scrum Metrics and Their Value to Scrum Teams
Defect density is also worth watching—it measures number of defects per software size, for
example per lines of code (LOC). While this metric can easily be skewed, it is valuable in fast-
moving projects to check if growth in defects is “normal” given the growth of the underlying
codebase.
3. Team Velocity
Velocity measures how many user stories were completed by the team, on average, in previous
sprints. It assists in estimating how much work the team is able to accomplish in future sprints.
While velocity is a key metric to watch in any scrum project, experts warn against using it as a
goal, or using velocity to compare teams to each other. Velocity is a subjective measure (based
https://www.sealights.io/software-development-metrics/11-scrum-metrics-and-their-value-to-scrum-teams/ 2/5
03/10/2023, 10:55 11 Scrum Metrics and Their Value to Scrum Teams
on each team’s definition of story points) that captures the team’s progress. Trying to artificially
increase velocity can act to erode trust and reduce transparency between teams and management.
4. Sprint Burndown
The sprint burndown chart is the classic representation of progress within a sprint. It shows the
number of hours remaining to complete the stories planned for the current sprint, for each day
during the sprint. The sprint burndown shows, at a glance, whether the team is on schedule to
complete the sprint scope or not.
The following metrics can help assess the effectiveness of scrum teams in meeting business
goals:
1. Time to Market
Time to market is the time a project takes to start providing value to customers, or the time it
takes to start generating revenue. The first can be calculated by taking the length of the number
of sprints before a scrum team releases to production. The second could be longer, depending on
the organization’s alpha and beta testing strategy.
2. ROI
Return on Investment (ROI) for a scrum project calculates the total revenue generated from a
product vs. the cost of the sprints required to develop it. Scrum has the potential to generate ROI
much faster than traditional development methods, because working software can be delivered to
customers very early on. With each sprint, scrum teams create more features that can translate
into growth in revenue.
3. Capital Redeployment
Capital Redeployment measures if it’s worthwhile to continue a scrum project, or if the
economic value of the project now exceeds its costs. In this case the team should be redeployed
to other, more profitable projects.
To determine Capital Redeployment, calculate the revenue value of the remaining items in the
project backlog (V), the actual cost (AC) of the sprints needed to complete those items, and the
opportunity cost (OC) of alternative product work the team could do. When V < AC + OC, the
project should end and the team redeployed to other projects.
4. Customer Satisfaction
There are several well-known metrics used to measure customer satisfaction. One is the Net
Promoter Score (NPS), which measures if users would recommend the software to others, do
nothing, or recommend against it. Using a consistent customer satisfaction metric and measuring
it for every release indicates whether the scrum team is meeting its end goal—to provide value to
customers.
2. Team Satisfaction
Surveying the scrum team periodically to see how satisfied they are with their work can provide
warning signals about culture issues, team conflicts or process issues.
Quality is critical to scrum projects. Stories completed do not provide value unless they are
tested and working as the customer expects. Existing tooling only provides fragmented stats,
such as unit test coverage and number of tests executed—it does not provide a good picture of
the overall quality status.
To learn more about the missing metric in agile development, and how to gather the missing data
to gain visibility of software quality, read our white paper, Quality: The Missing Metric for
Development Managers .
https://www.sealights.io/software-development-metrics/11-scrum-metrics-and-their-value-to-scrum-teams/ 5/5