Measure Quality, Not Quantity

  Agile   Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

All the project measures in the world are useless if the end result is not of high quality. But how do you quantify quality? What metrics measure how good something is? Agile practices respond by making quality part of the process rather than something you measure along the way.

The first article in this series — “Agile + Earned Value” — provided tips for bridging the gap between an agile approach and the traditional metrics that many organizations require. This piece suggests the need for a paradigm shift in understanding good performance. Instead of counting how many, project managers and teams should ask, “How good is it?”

Before project leaders can translate agile success from EVM reporting, they need to decide what they are measuring. EVM is about measuring performance and projecting outputs, but the only performance that should count is quality performance. Therefore, the most important measure of agile success is quality.

Agile embeds continuous quality improvement into the process of developing software, beginning as soon as a project is started. Before a team even begins working on anything, quality practices are introduced, starting with including testers as full team members. Testers help define the requirements and develop the acceptance criteria that guide the developers’ work.

The agile commitment to …

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