Filtering Performance Metrics

by Niki on August 20, 2010

We hope you’ve been enjoying the new filtering feature in AgileZen. In our latest release, we’ve extended filtering to include the performance metrics as well as added new key performance indicators. You’ll also notice the improved usability and new charts on the performance screen.

The same filtering capabilities that were added to the board in AgileZen are now available for the performance metrics, which means that you can examine your performance by slicing your data on everything from color, size, priority, owner, tag, and more! Filtering these metrics will help to more accurately forecast story completion because they take into account differences between stories. For example, because high priority items are very important they will likely move through your value stream faster than other stories.

In addition to slicing the metrics based on aspects of a story, you can now examine performance based on a selected period of time. The date panel allows you to pick date ranges to determine whether performance has increased, decreased, or stayed the same over time, which could help your team improve.

Lastly, we’ve added and changed a few metrics based on customer feedback. Throughput is a new metric that shows the number of stories completed for the time period selected. Also, our previous calculation of wait time took into account all the time that stories were marked either ready to pull or blocked. Now wait time only includes stories that are marked ready to pull and blocked time is the time stories spend blocked. Because the cause of high wait time is typically different than the cause of high blocked time, having these metrics separate can help you better understand the reasons for bottlenecks in your process.

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  • Kdaigle

    While most of the changes are a great improvement, the one thing I actually don't like is the cumulative graph. I think the new graphing library works great for the single data point graphs, but the top line border of each data set gets sort of… bolded/emphasized. I think this makes its a lot harder to see each group especially if the groups are relatively small to begin with. I thought the other graph was a bit clearer.

    Maybe you can take away the top line of each group? Thanks for the updates though! Any chance you're going to add any standard deviation calculations automatically with filtering? That'd really help with SLAs.

  • http://kohari.org/ nkohari

    I can see what you mean. The charting library draws a shadow effect under the line, which can get in the way on some charts. We've tweaked the display of the cumulative flow graph to remove this shadow and reduced the weight of the line, so the charts should be a bit clearer.

  • Russell Solberg

    Nice! I still think the comments on a story is by far the biggest piece of functionality that is missing.

  • Andrew

    This is a nice improvement.

    One feedback is – if you have a saved filter – why not just show it as a drop down menu right next to the date range fields – then you could easily switch between filters for comparison. At the moment its a bit clunky to go from one filter to another – it takes too many clicks and its not obvious how to do it.

    Keep up the good work

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