Manage Your Project Portfolio, 2nd Edition

What You Need to Measure About Your Projects

For projects, you need to measure the completion of running, tested features over time (as in Extreme Programming Installed [JAH02]), in other words, the team’s velocity over time. That’s all you need to measure—assuming your measures are correct. If your team doesn’t actually finish features, as in done-done-done, you’ll need other measurements, like defects and schedule dates.

When I say done-done-done, I mean that the product is working and documented enough that a customer could use it. The code is checked in, the developers and testers have planned and run “enough” tests, the documentation exists and is correct, any hardware is working, and the code has passed enough testing that the project ...