Manage Contracts

Once the contract has been awarded, the government and contractor team should conduct a project kickoff. The kickoff is an excellent opportunity to establish the foundation for the team culture. The team should together decide on the strategies to communicate across the team and on a meeting cadence and timeframe, and determine the full end-to-end process for sprint and release planning. Roles and responsibilities should be clearly established and documented upfront. The team should also agree to a set timeframe when these processes and communication strategies will be revisited after the team has had an opportunity to “learn” from a few sprints.

Typically, an Agile development has a specific schedule for meetings that take place during the sprint/release planning process. Some of the common meetings that take place during Agile development include:

• Sprint planning meeting
• Requirements prioritization meeting
• Daily stand-ups
• Sprint review meetings
• Release planning meetings
• Spring retrospectives meeting

It is important that the team understands the schedule and purpose of each of the meetings the team decides to hold during for its Agile implementation.

Managing Performance

Agile teams should have a structured way to track performance and execution of user stories. Below are sample metrics that the team can consider tracking as part of the Agile process. Visit the metrics page for additional details:

• Velocity/Throughput – Track the trend. As the trend stabilizes, teams can forecast their product backlog. Release planning also becomes easier for the Product Owner.
• Defect Density – Track the number of errors discovered during a sprint. An increasing number of bugs sprint-over-sprint could mean that the team is taking on too much work. A downward trend could point to changes in the definition of done improving quality.
• Customer Satisfaction – Measure satisfaction over time and also address negative feedback quickly.
• Team Satisfaction – Use the “Five Why’s” and other techniques to get to the root cause of whichever way the trend is going.
• Value Per Iteration – Measure how much value the scrum team delivers to the customer/business/organization. A downward trend in this metric could indicate that lower value features are being implemented and that it is time to stop development on the product – i.e., the product has reached maturity and the team should start work on the next high-value product?

Potential product-based quality measures:

• Defects by category
• Product defect density
• Release quality of test product
• Program defect density
• Backlogs of open defects
• Product quality over time
• Error density
• Defense severity index: direct measure of quality index presenting average defect severity
• Meeting product “doneness” criteria

Potential Service Quality Indicators

• Timeliness of service
• Defect detection ratio
• Test effectiveness ratio
• Defect detection capability
• Accessibility and convenience of the service
• Staff availability
• Convenience of hours of operation
• Accuracy of test results
• Courteousness of service delivery
• Adequacy of information disseminated
• Condition and safety of facilities used
• Customer satisfaction with a particular characteristic or overall service delivery
• Number of defects found by given time
• Timely defect fixes
• Number of tests attempted by given time