Accelerate

CHAPTER 14

WHY USE A SURVEY

Now that we know our survey data can be trusted—that is, we have a reasonable assurance that data from our well-designed and well-tested psychometric survey constructs is telling us what we think it’s telling us—why would we use a survey? And why should anyone else use a survey? Teams wanting to understand the performance of their software delivery process often begin by instrumenting their delivery process and toolchain to obtain data (we call data gathered in this way “system data” throughout this book). Indeed, several tools on the market now offer analysis on items such as lead time. Why would someone want to collect data from surveys and not just from your toolchain?

There are several reasons to use survey data. ...