Metrics are not Crystal Balls

Teams need visibility of their progress, but how can they get enough visibility about how they are doing in the Sprint?


There's no short answer but you can try this:

1. Convince your team to believe in metrics.
2. Choose the metrics that best work for your project -simplest one is number of completed user stories .
3. Make everybody look at the same set of metrics.
4. Put all metrics in just one place (a taskboard and burndown charts are more than probably you'll need).
5. Create the habit for all your team to provide initial estimates and then compare them to their actual work.
6. Do not waste too many cycles trying to innovate in metrics, everything has been already discovered, is just matter or look what would be good for your project.
7. Metrics are not black and white, there's a lot of gray areas in them.
8. Metrics are indicators, symptoms but not conclusions or explanations.