Forrester: - Making Leaders Successful Every Day

Application development (AD) teams that use Agile development processes, such as eXtreme Programming (XP), Scrum, DSDM, and others, are highly successful, yet they may be pressured more than traditional AD teams to quantify their results. Agile teams can use many traditional AD metrics, such as those that measure quality and customer satisfaction, but they also need to use some unique metrics to measure how much capability they deliver in their short iterations. Interestingly, Agile teams tend to do a better job than non-Agile teams in quantifying the value that they deliver to the business, and this is a trend that all AD teams should follow. Agile teams should use traditional metrics where possible, but they should build in mechanisms to collect specific Agile metrics that truly reflect the progress and quality of their work. Forrester has adapted its Balanced Scorecard (BSC) model for use with Agile development projects.