Chapter 7. Working with the data you’re collecting: the sum of the parts
This chapter covers
- Identifying when to use custom metrics
- Figuring out what you need to create a metric
- Combining data points to create metrics
- Building key metrics to track how well your team is working
Metrics are measurements or properties that help in making decisions. In agile processes metrics can be created from the data your team is generating to help determine where you need to take action to improve.
To create a metric you only need two things:
- Data to generate the metric from
- A function to calculate the metric
In previous chapters we’ve been focusing on the data you can collect from the different systems in your application lifecycle and what you can learn from it alone or combined with other data. Now you can start combining data points to create your own metrics using the following steps.
- Explore your data. Ensure that you know what you have.
- Break down your data to determine what to track. Using the knowledge you have about your data, pick out the most useful and telling data points to build metrics with.
- Build your functions around data points. Adding together multiple data points that are related to a behavior will give you metrics that tell you a lot with a simple measurement.
Figure 7.1 shows these steps in the context of the big picture.
