Continuous improvement with basic metrics

You can’t improve something without measuring it...

… and even if you could, how would you know you were improving?

I recently spoke to Julien Therier, Software Engineering Lead for Hivebench (part of Elsevier). He leads the development team behind the Lab Notebook software for the scientific community. He’s been using Plandek for over a year now and has had continued success in driving improvements within the team. He told me that much of the focus had been on best practices:

_“That’s where we use Plandek. It helped us to improve our best practices, step by step. We also created our own Plandek dashboard to match our needs. Included a few best practices - like ticket reference in commits, velocity, bugs vs features to avoid code debt.”

The trend over the last 12 months clearly shows the improvements the team at Hivebench was able to achieve.

Julien went on to explain how they continued to use various metrics and reports to regularly review their progress as a team:

“Following our sprint completion on a Monday morning we receive a Plandek notification that our Sprint Report is available. We are then able to use it for our Retro.”

Agile delivery and engineering metrics can often be a confusing and complex landscape, but the team at Hivebench is a great reminder of how simple it can be. Focus on a metric you want to improve, take action to improve it, and then measure and celebrate the success.