Metrics

Free stuff

My video class on Flow Metrics Basics. Learn about the four primary flow metrics of Cycletime, Throughput, WIP, and Work Item Age. Discover how each one works individually and how they're interrelated. You can get this class for free if you sign up for my newsletter, which is also free.

Jira collects and maintains all kinds of useful data about your workflow. Unfortunately it does a horrible job of exposing that in any meaningful way. I got frustrated with this and wrote JiraMetrics to extract all the data in a format that assists decision making. This tool is open source and you can use it for free.

Metrics in general

• Different levels of the organization should be looking at very different metrics. Understand who should be looking at what.
• Goodhart’s Law says that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.” Many people struggle with this one.

Measuring flow metrics

• Understanding basic flow metrics of Cycletime, Throughput, Work In Progress (WIP), and Work Item Age
• Understanding flow efficiency, a very powerful metric that’s rarely used because of the difficulty in measuring it.
• In order to measure any of the basic flow metrics, we need a clear definition of the start and end points
• Common problems with flow metrics
  • We often start collecting data before we even know what we want to do with it.
  • We often collect the wrong data
  • We often misinterpret what’s there
  • We focus on keeping people busy instead of optimizing for any of effectiveness, efficiency, or predictability.
  • We don’t slice the work well and this skews the data. See how to slice stories or slice epics

Gaming metrics

• If people know that a thing is being measured, they’ll change their behaviour to ensure that measurement makes them look good. Sometimes the result of that behaviour change is so wildly different from the desired outcome, that it causes other problems. That’s a perverse incentive.

Metrics from Jira

You should really use an existing tool to extract metrics from Jira, like my own JiraMetrics, but if you really want to do it yourself, I’ve documented the API’s I use.

When will we be done?

When trying to answer the question “when will we be done?”, we often try to estimate how big the individual work items are, and this is complete waste. What we want to do instead, is to create a probabilistic forecast. In a nutshell, an estimate is a made up number based on how we feel about complexity, and a probabilistic forecast is a far more accurate mathematical calculation based on historical data. It’s time for estimates to go away.

Part of having an accurate forecast is ensuring that the data itself is inherantly predictable and there are specific things we can do, to improve that prodictability.

Once we have that forecast, we need to understand the cognitive biases that make us trust it less, even though it’s more accurate. If we want to make better decisions, we need to understand our own biases.

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Article	Date
Collecting metrics for no reason	December 16, 2025
Gaming metrics	July 23, 2025
Jira Metrics 2.12	July 14, 2025
Wait states	May 7, 2025
Basic Flow Metrics	November 21, 2024
Visualizing Flow Efficiency	October 5, 2024
Tracking metrics	July 15, 2024
Flow Efficiency	July 6, 2024
One Thing vs Multiple Things	June 3, 2022
Improving Predictability - Consistent Units and Conclusion	September 16, 2021
Improving Predictability - Average Age	September 15, 2021
Improving Predictability - All work must finish	September 14, 2021
Improving Predictability - Average Arrival and Departure Rates	September 13, 2021
Improving Predictability	September 12, 2021
Determining cycle time from an online system	May 18, 2021
Improve the work, not the metrics	April 14, 2021
The three flow metrics (plus one)	April 12, 2021