This one is for those of you who have or are currently moving from any methodology to a quality engineering (QE) or continuous quality (QC) environment.
What are your metrics being used? (Doesn’t just have to be measuring quality, I want to hear about everything that’s measured)
What are the metrics you have brought in as part of the change or discarded?
Which metrics are proving the most valuable in a QE or QC environment?
Thanks in advance for your answers.
My last team where I worked full time and we used a QE approach, the engineering organization already enjoyed a great collaborative culture when I joined. Our team did ensemble (mob) programming, test-driven development and other good core practices. We brainstormed about ways to measure so we could experiment to improve. What ended up working best was two things: cycle time, from when we started a story to when it got to production (JIRA, much as I loathe it, did this for us) and “developer joy”. For the joy, we created an anonymous 5 question survey based on Amy Edmunson’s work. We set up a Slack reminder to ask team members to fill it out each Friday afternoon, and people were pretty good about it. (Dr. Nicole Forsgren’s SPACE model came out after we already had our survey, or we might have borrowed from it as well)>
Over time one interesting finding was that when cycle time was shorter (quicker feedback loops), joy was higher, and vice versa The slower cycle times and lower joy corresponded with periods in which the powers that be micromanaged the team and assigned work to specific people or sub-teams, rather than letting us self-organize. No surprise.
Other than that, over the years, my teams found metrics most useful when we first identified our biggest problem in the way of our quality goals, designed small experiments to chip away at that problem, and identified metrics that would let us see the progress (or lack of) for the experiments.
Also I am a big fan of the DORA key metrics. I find they usefully reflect process quality in most contexts, and are super easy to collect. You can just answer questions, you don’t have to instrument your code,
Thank you, that’s really helpful 