Empirical Data

Revenue per Employee

The ratio (gross revenue / # of employees) is a key competitive indicator within an industry. This varies significantly by industry.

Product Cost Ratio

Total expenses and costs for the product(s)/system(s) being measured, including operational costs compared to revenue.

Employee Satisfaction

Some form of sentiment analysis to help gauge employee engagement, energy, and enthusiasm.

Customer Satisfaction

Some form of sentiment analysis to help gauge customer engagement and happiness with the product.

Customer Usage Index

Measurement of usage, by feature, to help infer the degree to which customers find the product useful and whether actual usage meets expectations on how long users should be taking with a feature

Build and integration frequency

The number of integrated and tested builds per time period. For a team that is releasing frequently or continuously, this measure is superseded by actual release measures.

Release Frequency

The number of releases per time period, e.g. continuously, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, etc. This helps reflect the time needed to satisfy the customer with new and competitive products.

Release Stabilization Period

The time spent correcting product problems between the point the developers say it is ready to release and the point where it is actually released to customers. This helps represent the impact of poor development practices and underlying design and code base.

Mean Time to Repair

The average amount of time it takes from when an error is detected and when it is fixed. This helps reveal the efficiency of an organization to fix an error.

Cycle Time

The amount of time from when work starts on a release until the point where it is actually released. This measure helps reflect an organization’s ability to reach its customer.

Lead Time

The amount of time from when an idea is proposed or a hypothesis is formed until a customer can benefit from that idea. This measure may vary based on customer and product. It is a contributing factor for customer satisfaction.

Time-to-Learn

The total time needed to sketch an idea or improvement, build it, deliver it to users, and learn from their usage.

Feature Usage Index

Measurement of features in the product that are frequently used. This helps capture features that are rarely or never used.

Innovation Rate

The percentage of effort or cost spent on new product capabilities, divided by total product effort or cost. This provides insight into the capacity of the organization to deliver new product capabilities.

Defect trends

Measurement of change in defects since last measurement. A defect is anything that reduces the value of the product to a customer, user, or to the organization itself. Defects are generally things that don’t work as intended.

On-Product Index

The percentage of time teams spend working on product and value.

Installed Version Index

The number of versions of a product that are currently being supported. This reflects the effort the organization spends supporting and maintaining older versions of software.

Technical Debt

A concept in programming that reflects the extra development and testing work that arises when “quick and dirty” solutions result in later remediation. It creates an undesirable impact on the delivery of value and an avoidable increase in waste and risk.

Production Incident Trends

The number of times the Development Team was interrupted to fix a problem in an installed product. The number and frequency of Production Incidents can help indicate the stability of the product.

Active code branches, time spent merging code between branches

These measures are like the Installed Version Index, since different deployed versions usually have separate code branches.

Time spent context switching

Number of meetings per day per person, and the number of times a day team members are interrupted to help people outside the team can give simple insight into the magnitude of the problem.

Market Share

 The relative percentage of the market controlled by the product.

Customer or user satisfaction gap

The difference between a customer or user’s desired experience and their current experience.