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Saturday, August 23, 2014

Measuring Business value in Agile projects

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Because the first principle of the Agile Manifesto talks about delivering valuable software to the customer, many agile practitioners are constantly thoughtful of the value in each step of the software-development lifecycle.

At the thirty-thousand-foot level, value creation starts with gathering requirements and continues with backlog creation, backlog grooming, writing user stories, and development, finally ending with integration, deployment, and support. Even with knowledge of all these moving parts, it is common to see organizations only measuring value during development and ignoring the rest of the steps.

What’s the fix? During backlog creation, user stories need to be compared and contrasted in order to promote maximum value delivery. The product owner might need to use different techniques, such as T-shirt sizing, in order to better prioritize the project’s stories.

An alternate approach to measuring the business value of user stories is to use a three-dimensional metric that incorporates complexity, business value, and the ROI. Creating value can often require a change in perspective from the normal project’s tasks and functions. Thinking outside the box, identifying business value before writing the user stories is much better than writing and then trying to evaluate.

Read  the complete article about measuring business value on TechWell

Picture courtesy https://flic.kr/p/8E7Dr5

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