A Method for Metric Management at a Large-Scale Agile Software Development Organization

The benefits of agile methods for small projects inspired organizations to scale these methods to more extensive settings consisting of multiple agile teams. Such scaling agile settings are more complex, which can make maintaining situational awareness difficult. Metrics can alleviate this problem by increasing insight into the development organization. However, adopting metrics comes with various socio-technical challenges, and current research is missing guidance on metric management in large agile organizations. Therefore, we present a goal-based method designed for a large agile case organization to support stakeholders in selecting, operating, and scaling metrics. Moreover, based on the learnings at the case organization, we present design principles that can potentially guide the development of methods suitable for other contexts. We conducted this research following an action design research (ADR) approach combined with situational method engineering (SME). Our findings indicate that our method proved effective for the case organization. This was accomplished by combining well-established elements (eg, goal-orientation and tool support) from measurement programs designed for traditional software engineering with unique elements of our method (eg, metric scaling activities and alignment with agile software development). With this study, we provide deep insights into how metrics are managed at a large agile case organization. Researchers and practitioners can use this work as a foundation for designing measurement programs suitable to other scaling agile organizations.