The Ultimate Agile Metric

Ron Jeffries wrote an article last year called, "A Metric Leading to Agility" (http://www.xprogramming.com/xpmag/jatRtsMetric.htm), that really helped us view our efforts in agile software development. The metric is useful in keeping the focus on what's most important to customers; the frequent delivery of working (meaning acceptance tested), high-priority software features. Jeffries describes "Running Tested Features" (RTF) as the ultimate agile metric. Some customers are less than enthusiastic about Acceptance Testing, since they are (ideally) the ones that should be verifying the software is doing what they need and requested. (Note: to address this, Mike Con mentioned referring to Acceptance Tests as "Conditions of Satisfaction" when discussing the need for them with customers. What customer doesn't want to be satisfied?)

Ideally Acceptance Tests should be automated to enable the rapid re-running of all defined tests at the end of each iteration (or perhaps lag an iteration in the case of some UI tests). This is important because features that are delivered without being Acceptance Tested give a false sense of true overall project velocity since there are unknowns about the untested features delivered at the end of each iteration. These unknowns equate to some unpredictable amount of incomplete (defects, re factoring) work making the project cost and schedule harder to pin down.

The RTF metric also has a residual benefit of forcing agility on teams or perhaps better said, enticing them to become more agile. Tracking the RTF metric requires that most agile principles be in place on a project leaving the team little choice but to implement an agile approach if they are being measured by the RTF metric.

Ron Says:

Imagine the following definition of RTF

1. The desired software is broken down into named features (requirements, stories) which are part of what it means to deliver the desired system.
2. For each named feature, there are one or more automated acceptance tests which, when they work, will show that the feature in question is implemented.
3. The RTF metric shows, at every moment in the project, how many features are passing all their acceptance tests.

How many customer-defined features are known, through independently-defined testing, to be working? As Ron says, "Now there's a metric I could live with!"