Emerson must have been an engineer, of sorts, as I’m sure he was thinking of metrics and how they can help, or hurt, your efforts to ship products. No, I am not anti-metric. I do believe that metrics are critical to good decision making. However, I think it’s easy to go overboard with your metric gathering and analysis and never ship.
Here are the product development metrics I care about:
- Are we on schedule? Yes or No. ”Almost” is not a valid answer
- I use SharePoint for project tracking and monitor the schedule regularly. Tasks not completed on time ultimately mean we will end up eliminating functionality, push out release dates, or cut back on testing which increases risk to the overall product quality..
- What % of the requirements have been completed?
- At the end of the day it’s important to know if you’ve satisfied the business requirements. Completing the functional requirements without having truly met the business requirements happens too often. Don’t let it happen to you.
- What % of the requirements have been tested?
- I need QA to think about the business requirements just as I need developers too. We build products to achieve business goals. We do not build products just to build products.
- How many bugs are currently open?
- While it’s an imperfect measure due to the fact that not all bugs are created equal, it does provide useful information. Track this throughout the project and avoid letting the open bug count too large. If you reach the end of the project with a large number of bugs it is unlikely that you’ll fix them all.
- Did the release have the desired impact? As you evolve your requirements process make sure you work with the business folks to define what the impact of this new product release should be. Will it increase user logins by 10% a month? Will it result in 25% more purchases? Once you release the product stay on top of how the product has impacted the business. If it failed to meet the goals specified or resulted in a negative impact to other key metrics, let people know.
What do you think? How do these line up with what you track?
-John
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