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Ho do you compare Agile teams?

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Stelian ROMAN Project Manager| MicroSafety Carlingford, New South Wales, Australia
There are quite a few frameworks, claiming to be Agile, that promise do deliver twice as much in half the time. The state of Agile reports and the Chaos reports have also very optimistic views on the effectiveness of Agile transition.
I am using Agile frameworks since 2002 when I was in software development. We were in the "perfect storm" using XP and then Scrum in a mid size software company were we had full support from the owners and direct interaction with the users.
Since that time I worked with many Scrum teams and I tried to compare their productivity. It was hard even inside the same organisation.
What are some meaningful metrics that can be used to compare Agile teams?
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Stelian ROMAN Project Manager| MicroSafety Carlingford, New South Wales, Australia
Jan 19, 2019 11:01 AM
Replying to John Herman
...
https://www.webratio.com/website/documenta...th_WebRatio.pdf

it can also be reached via the ddway.it site, but that's a direct link
"The aim of the paper is to evaluate the productivity level of projects developed and deployed with the application development platform IFML WebRatio by our Competence Center." Of course that they can do it for ONE project at 1.13 hrs/FP. There is a very ambitious framework called project half double that claims that they can deliver a project in half the time and at half the cost. I couldn't find any hard evidence beyond their white papers. One of the famous Agile books claims the same double productivity at half the cost. I have 30 years experience and I haven't seen that kind of improvement. A 20% improvement is a big achievement, 5-10% means that you recovered the investment but going from days to 1 hr per FP means that you are the Wizard of OZ.
IFPUG has a pretty good database that can be used for benchmarking. That is my preference for industry benchmarking, although it is pretty optimistic. 1 because nobody will report a bad project and 2 because a company that used professional FP counters will do as part of a process improvement initiative. I know is a very productive framework (https://www.lansa.com/) that can deliver faster and cheaper at less than 1 hr/FP. It is 30 years old and was initially developed for AS/400. It does what it promise BUT ... you have to use their language, have a very systematic design process and have brilliant developers. Having the last 2 helps regardless the framework but that's not the norm.

I am very cautions using promotional white papers for benchmarking.
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Stelian ROMAN Project Manager| MicroSafety Carlingford, New South Wales, Australia
Jan 19, 2019 11:05 AM
Replying to John Herman
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Indeed, the Upper Management and HR folks are very interested in comparing Agile teams (and individuals). It (presumably) helps them manage performance bonuses and raises, as well as in helping them identify people who are underperforming and need help improving. Even if you have a general qualitative grade for the performance of individuals and teams, those groups will push you for quantitative data, as it may be required to support inquiries of their decisions to award raises and bonuses and let employees go.
My question is about comparing Agile teams not individuals. I believe that any team should define a baseline to measure their efficiency. It is also mandatory for the organisation to benchmark teams working on the same product as a way of identifying good practices.
As an individual comparing yourself with others is a sign of maturity and professionalism. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses.
I recommend to read how the pair programming started. The 'best' developer tried to show off and discovered that you can always learn from less skilled and experienced.
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Stelian ROMAN Project Manager| MicroSafety Carlingford, New South Wales, Australia
The role of HR in Agile is a different story. In my opinion self managing must include hiring, firing and bonuses like it was 30 years ago.
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