How to meet your software goals by using Agile methodologies and business metrics

How to use business and agile metrics to meet software goals

Software consulting isn't just about writing code. It is about building the right product in a timely manner within the clients’ budget. Consider business and agile metrics to better understand where to start. Business metrics help us determine whether the solution satisfies a market need, and Agile metrics measure specific aspects of the development process.

Understanding the client's business, industry, and corporate values are a top priority for leading consultancies since it lets the vendor align with the client before providing advisory and pragmatic solutions for their requirements. In most cases, the Product Owner (PO) or Project Manager (PM) is in charge of the project roadmap and the key performance indicators.

The business analysis often includes product metrics such as acquisition, conversion, engagement, and revenue or development metrics such as velocity, cycle times, test coverage, and defect rate, among others. When companies evaluate and share this information to determine priorities, consultancies can better understand the objectives, technologies, and gather people with the right skill set to focus on the client’s project and take it to the next level.

Agile development cycles and expectations

Every team has a unique process for shipping software, and the workflow should be structured in a way that best leverages the customer team’s abilities. People from different backgrounds bring different perspectives and skills to deliver a better version of the product. All those involved in product development - product owners, designers, developers, project managers, and stakeholders - need to be aligned with a clear primary objective. Teams can then translate those objectives into user stories, prioritize them according to the business goals, estimate them, and plan work based on an Agile framework that best suits the client’s needs.

Once estimations are in place, developers should build clean code and deliver it continuously in Pull Requests (PRs), where another developer or PM can review it before Quality Assurance (QA) is carried out throughout the sprint cycle. Advisors usually recommend automating the deployment process following Continuous Integration and Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) to automatically detect and avoid human errors as efficiently as possible.

When consultancies follow Agile methodologies, they will assess productivity throughout the different stages of the software development lifecycle to create better goal alignment, a culture of feedback and recognition, and enable the team to grow. Scrum rituals like sprint reviews and retrospectives can help clients evaluate the team's business understanding, the development cycle, and the final product itself.

Conclusion

Enterprises worldwide are leveraging software consultancies to remain competitive and meet their business goals, but not all software consultancies are as focused on metrics or deeply understanding clients’ business. Thus, specialized vendors recommend using Agile and business Metrics to deliver working software that allows their clients to meet their software needs by:

1. Arrange a full-time team for the project to allow them to understand and focus on the client’s requirements while using Agile and business metrics.
2. Set expectations with an aligned team that can accurately estimate and prioritize deliverables using automated processes and Scrum rituals.

At Stack Builders, we use Agile Methodologies, working with business and Agile metrics, following candid communication and continuous improvement policies. These practices ensure that everyone in our team is aligned with our client's companies’ goals and that we've appropriately estimated and prioritized the deliverables.

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If you want to learn more, contact us to discuss how we can deliver additional value for your organization through customized software advisory and development. Let's build together!