Tag Archives: metrics

Continuous Process Improvement — Deliver Less Code at Better Quality to Achieve More

Posted on by

In my last post I claimed we rebuilt our website properties with with half to one third the developers and with “about half 65%” the resulting code. All to justify my claim that “You accomplish more by doing less.”

Now, I’ll back that claim with some metrics.

Lines of code

There are a number of tools for measuring ruby code size and complexity. The metric_fu gem does a good job a aggregating them.

But because our retired rails application is six years old, I resorted to the perl based cloc to count lines of code. I excluded standard libraries and counted code in the app and lib directories supporting websites common to both codebases.

Old Application Lines of code (LOC) New Application Lines of code (LOC)
Websites 39,981 Websites 27,071
Admin websites 15,011 Data ingest/processing app 6,176
Shared library 2,716
Total Old 54,992 Total New 35,963

Our current codebase is 65% the size of our original*.

Code size is a predictor of defect count and ongoing maintenance. That our current codebase is 35% more efficient at delivering roughly the same perceived value implies it is materially less expensive to maintain.

Take from this that lines of code is a terrible measure of productivity.

Less code is not our only indicator of the health

As measured by rake stat, we now have 3.6 lines of test code for every line of production code. Our old codebase measures 0.4. Our new applications have 9 lines of test for every one in our old.

Test lines of code is not a measure of test coverage or quality but remember I also work in this code. I know from direct experience that the new tests are more thoughtful — less fragile and opaque — better at testing real business logic with real data. We have invested in improving our test practice.

Better tests and better test coverage allows developers to take more initiative in changing and optimizing code. We can turn around features faster and we can improve our code with less fear of breakage. It’s a virtuous circle.

Again, we rebuilt our corporate websites with half to one third the development resource, 35% less code and better test coverage. We did this over a similar time frame in one week increments without schedule pressure or extraordinary efforts.

For the product and executive managers out there

Spiral Staircase

Managers want predictable delivery in short cycles. But that is an outcome. You achieve that outcome by reducing waste and building with quality.

If you don’t make quality your priority, your developers — out of loyalty and best intentions — will not build with quality. And that leads to larger, less maintainable code, longer and less predictable delivery cycles. The opposite of what you want.

Allow developers their due as craftspeople and professionals. Instead of banging the drum on delivery and delegating responsibility for quality, commit time and attention to building with quality and your team will deliver.

Next time, I’ll dive into how and why our practices have changed over time…

When I first measured this it was 50%. In the meantime, we’ve added features, services and a new source data feed. Still 5% of our current codebase is localized terms of use and privacy policies that didn’t exist in our old website. So, growth of the codebase is something to watch but I’m not sweating it yet.

Don’t Justify Agile Based on Productivity (revisit)

Posted on by

Kallokain wrote a rebuttal to my post questioning the value of productivity metrics to justify agile.

In a recent article Ken Judy takes the stand that agile software development should not be adopted on the grounds of higher productivity. The reason for that, Judy claims, is that there are better ways to justify adopting agile than with hard numbers.
I can sympatize, because I have worked in my share of software development projects where the measurements did more harm than good. Nevertheless, I believe Judy is wrong in this instance. Most organizations measure the wrong thing. That does not imply that measuring is bad in itself. (read the post)

Just to be clear, my objection is not that agile should not be justified by hard numbers but that I haven’t seen a metric for productivity gain specifically that both stood systematic scrutiny and was economically feasible for the average business to collect.

In my experience, measures that are tied to some non-revenue related abstract concept of “productivity” such as lines of code, story points, etc. are more problematic than helpful.

My point about velocity is that it is a measure that should be a feedback system back to the teams and becomes problematic if it is considered some sort of intrinsically meaningful measure that can be reported to senior executives (as in “We completed 20 story points last iteration, 25 this iteration. We’re five story points more efficient!”)

I agree that the ultimate measure of success in business is profit. I understand that any business decision should somehow influence revenue gains or hard dollar cost savings.

The problem with justifying an agile adoption based on revenue gains is there are so many other considerations that attempts to credit any single factor become dubious.

Cost savings need to be real not theoretical. Who did you lay off? How much budget did you give back based on agile adoption? Jeff Sutherland has a paper that does show significant cost savings using Scrum. The subject company was a CMMI-5 organization and there commitment and rigor to measurement was higher than most companies would support and is cost justified based on the government regulations they perform under.

If someone can propose a relevant metric that is economical for a small to medium size business to collect, that can be measured over time in small enough units to show increased performance due to specific process changes, that has some relation to reality that can be meaningfully communicated to senior managers, and doesn’t create more problems than it solves, I will be happy to consider it.

Benefits of Agile Adoption – from a manager

Posted on by

To help some peers advocate for agile adoption, I prepared an experience report to demonstrate how my old team benefited from XP and Scrum practices. This is an extension and refinement of an earlier post on the benefits of XP.

Team Cohesion

yellow rope with knot by limonada on flickrBefore and during our agile adoption, I informally administered the Gallup Q12 employee engagement survey. It is composed of twelve simple questions. Agreement correlates to retention, customer loyalty, safety records, productivity, and profitability.

From the beginning to the mid-point of our adoption, staff went from a response rate of 70% agreement 30% disagreement to 80% agreement, 15% neutral and 4% disagreement.

The most improvement was in daily opportunities “to do my best” and daily feedback on performance and expectations.

I’m convinced if I had administered the Q12 late in our adoption, we would have had even better results. The key un-addressed concerns were about having a best friend at work and feeling connected to the mission of the company. By 2007 our team grew to include people brought in by personal recommendation of other members of the team and our portfolio included consumer facing work directly for our CEO.

Rather than re-take the Q12, we undertook a 360° performance review. That we did this on our own initiative shows just how much trust we had built with each other.

Test Coverage/Code Quality

Green Light by wiccked on flickrXP practices enforced methodical unit test coverage, mutually arrived at coding conventions, and real-time code inspection by multiple members of the team. The team went from no unit test practice to comprehensive coverage over the business logic and controller layers. (Unit tests against data access and gui were less comprehensive. I don’t intend to get in the middle of that debate here.)

A user story, test-driven approach to development has been shown to reduce defects in final testing by 40%.

XP and Scrum force conversations between the development team and product owner that incentivize all to build quality into the software rather than allowing technical debt to accumulate and relying on downstream QA process to fix the application.

In 2006-2007 there were no business impacting failures of our internally authored software. We were able to function as a project team with no dedicated developer maintenance staff. Change requests were minimal enough that we were able to prioritize them into our project sprints as overhead.

Reduced Risk

While any team has experts, “Agile” practices reduced our reliance on “specialists”. The entire team was capable of working on and maintaining any aspect of the code base. We passed the “bus test”; despite our small size, no project was at risk if any given member of the team became unavailable.

Leadership

Our team raised our skills and began contributing to our field. We write, present and teach at conferences on topics of scrum, XP and platform as well as contributing to open source projects and developer knowledge bases.

Recruiting and Retention

After establishing “Agile” practices we recruited skilled candidates from higher paying positions who desired to work in our culture and with our practices. We received inquiries from as far away as South America and Europe. Despite the reputation of our team and market demand we retained staff.

An additional benefit is that pairing provided an efficient on-boarding process for new hires. Developers joining the team provided immediate contribution. A metrics-based way to demonstrate this is to show that sprint commitments weren’t affected new hires first weeks. I observed that but mainly base this on comments from the team lead and existing members of the team.

Workplace Diversity

A 2006 paper by McDowell, Werner, Bullock and Fernald found that pair programming practice, “may help increase female representation in the field.”

Agile values and practices support a collaborative, empowering and sustainable work place. Such environments support diversity and take advantage of the breadth of experience each worker represents.

Client Satisfaction

We asked for quotes from our clients, vendors and even competitors which we included in our budget presentations (I’ve pretty aggressively scrubbed them):

“Working with the agile Software Development team has been rewarding on many levels…it’s a team that celebrates creativity, organization, listening, feedback, openness, honesty…and is proof positive that a great process results in great product. I look forward to our very regular meetings (I even readjust my travel schedule as much as possible to not miss anything) and am never disappointed. They are an engaging and engaged group of individuals.” – CEO

“[____ saved] half a head in [another team] and a full head in my team.” – VP

“The _______ written by our development team are the guiding-light to our decisions. [third party solution] has a vast wealth of information but no good reporting and our in-house [solution] enables us to divine meaning from the mountain of data.” – VP Traffic Operations

“We also use [third party solution] for all of our broadcast networks but I have heard about your software technology for ____. We currently do that through manual operators but I’d like to understand how you do that more sometime and how it works…” – Senior Executive, Competitor

“Given the complexities of ____ that includes the combined limitations of automation, graphic and traffic systems I believe [the team] has created a solution that has proven to be much more capable than most systems than I’ve worked with.” – Vendor

Frequent Delivery, Adaptability

Throughout 2006-2007 our team of 3-8 developers balanced two simultaneous lines of work on diverse projects built in Microsoft Windows Forms, ASP.NET to SQL Data Analysis Services Data Warehouses, Vista compatible Windows Presentation Foundation and XAML, open source .NET MVC frameworks and Ruby on Rails including a rich windows application built on beta Microsoft Technology.

The team completed eight IT and three consumer projects while doubling head count from 5 to 10 (+2 contractors). We initiated our consumer product initiative and achieved our first release of a rich windows application with a six month allocation of effectively 1.5 – 2.5 developers.

Invention/Innovation

Agile practices evolved from Lean management and associated knowledge creation theory. In this, it shares ancestry with Six Sigma.

Agile is based on empirical not plan-driven process control. It is closer to lean product development than lean industrial manufacturing.

Lean product development models sustained innovation as a process of knowledge creation and conversion within an organization that acquires and shares learning in an cycles within and across teams and up and down from leadership.

Agile fosters true joint work which is the only form of workplace collegiality that advances organizational change and innovation.

Our consumer product was recognized for its design and implementation by Microsoft’s platform and developer evangelist team as well as by the WPF team. It achieved high ratings in usability testing with end users (avg rating 8 of 10) and showed potential to deliver on its revenue targets.