Transparency, Source Code Quality, and Metrics


In “Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms,” Hannah Fry relates this story:

In 2012, a number of disabled people in Idaho were informed that their Medicaid assistance was being cut. Although they all qualified for benefits, the state was slashing their financial support – without warning – by as much as 30 percent, leaving them struggling to pay for their care. This wasn’t a political decision; it was the result of a new ‘budget tool’ that had been adopted by the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare – a piece of software that automatically calculated the level of support that each person should receive.

Unable to understand why their benefits had been reduced, or to effectively challenge the reduction, the residents turned to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for help.

[The ACLU] began by asking for details on how the algorithm worked, but the Medicaid team refused to explain their calculations. They argued that the software that assessed the cases was a ‘trade secret’ and couldn’t be shared. Fortunately, the judge presiding over the case disagreed. The budget tool that wielded so much power over the residents was then handed over, and revealed to be – not some sophisticated AI, not some beautifully crafted mathematical model, but an Excel spreadsheet.

Within the spreadsheet, the calculations were supposedly based on historical cases, but the data was so badly riddled with bugs and errors that it was, for the most part, entirely useless. Worse, once the ACLU team managed to unpick the equations, they discovered ‘fundamental statistical flaws in the way that the formula itself was structured’. The budget tool had effectively been producing random results for a huge number of people. The algorithm – if you can call it that – was of such poor quality that the court would eventually rule it unconstitutional.

My first thoughts were, “How bad a spreadsheet hack do you gotta be to have your work be declared unconstitutional? And just how many hacks does it take to build an unconstitutional spreadsheet?”

To be fair, math is hard. Government is complex. And I’m comfortable with the assumption that everyone who had a hand in building this spreadsheet had good intentions. Venturing a guess, the breakdown happened at the manager/politician/lawyer level.

It is probable that the complexity of the task quickly overtook the abilities of the spreadsheet author(s) and the capabilities of the tool. Eventually, no single person understood how the whole thing worked. Consequently, making a change in one place affected how the spreadsheet worked in n other places and no one was capable of regression testing the beast. But the manager/politician/lawyer types knew what to do: Hide behind the “trade secret” smoke.

There are many lessons from this story. Plenty of points of failure. What I’m interested in writing about is the importance of transparency and how a good set of performance metrics can help in maintaining transparency.

The externally facing opacity in this story is readily apparent. What we don’t (and probably never will) see is the lack of transparency prevalent internally to the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare and whomever designed and built the spreadsheet tool. I’d bet a round of drinks that neither has heard of Agile much less employed its principles and practices. These by themselves – when actually practiced long term – go a long way toward establishing a culture of transparency. This is the key. Long term practice. A period of time is needed to change behaviors, mindsets, attitudes, beliefs, and when necessary, personnel. Even over the long term, implementing an Agile methodology isn’t improvisational theater. A strategy and a way to measure progress is needed.

Which gets me to metrics.

Selecting metrics and tuning them over time is critical to measuring team performance and developing improvement plans. Metrics that inform meaningful actions are the goal. Leave the vanity metrics that verify what managers want to hear or already “know” to the competition.

I’ve encountered my share of overly complex ways to measure the performance of individuals and teams. Often the metrics taken from machine-like task work (for example, assembly line work) are applied to creative or intellectual/knowledge tasks. This type of re-purposing results in, for example, counting lines of code or the number of source code check-ins as an indicator of software developer productivity. It never ends well.

When working to define a set of metrics to track an individual or team’s performance it is more effective to begin by asking several questions.

  • What problems are you trying to solve?
  • What questions will your chosen metrics answer?
  • What questions will your chosen metrics not answer?
  • How, specifically, will you know you can trust you metrics? How will you know when they are right and how will you know when they are wrong?
  • How well do your metrics compliment each other? That is, by combining them do you end up with a much better picture of individual or team performance the you do by considering individual metrics?
  • Do your metrics support any planned actions for improvement? Are you collecting actionable metrics or vanity metrics?

Finally, it is important to understand the limits of performance metrics. Displaying velocity charts that have fractions of story points implies an accuracy that simply isn’t there. Significantly adjusting project timelines based on the first three sprints worth of velocity data can have adverse secondary effects on the project.

There is no perfect set of metrics, no divine set of measures that match an impossible standard of perfect objectivity and fairness. The best possible set of metrics is one that supports useful decisions rather than simply instructs managers where to apply the stick. They should help show the way to performance improvement rather than simply report results.

I work to have 3-5 metrics, depending on the individual, the team, and the project. Less than 3 and the picture starts to look rather flat. More then 5 and the task of performance monitoring can become overly complicated and cumbersome. Keep it lean and manageable. That way, it’s easier to tell when things aren’t working and your metrics are much less likely to violate your team’s constitutional rights.

The Practice of Sizing Spikes with Story Points

Every once and a while it’s good to take a tool out of it’s box and find out if it’s still fit for purpose. Maybe even find if it can be used in a new way. I recently did this with the practice of sizing spikes with story points. I’ve experienced a lot of different projects since last revisiting my thinking on this topic. So after doing a little research on current thinking, I updated an old set of slides and presented my position to a group of scrum masters to set the stage for a conversation. My position: Estimating spikes with story points is a vanity metric and teams are better served with spikes that are time-boxed but unsized.

While several colleagues came with an abundance of material to support their particular position, no one addressed the points I raised. So it was a wash. My position hasn’t changed appreciably. But I did gain from hearing several arguments for how spikes could be used more effectively if they were to be sized with story points. And perhaps the feedback from this article will further evolve my thinking on the subject.

To begin, I’ll answer the question of “What is a spike?” by accepting the definition from


A task aimed at answering a question or gathering information, rather than at producing shippable product. Sometimes a user story is generated that cannot be well estimated until the development team does some actual work to resolve a technical question or a design problem. The solution is to create a “spike,” which is some work whose purpose is to provide the answer or solution.

The phrase “cannot be well estimated” is suggestive. If the work cannot be well estimated than what is the value of estimating it in the first place? Any number placed on the spike is likely to be for the most part arbitrary. Any number greater than zero will therefore arbitrarily inflate the sprint velocity and make it less representative of the business value being delivered. It may make the team feel better about their performance, but it tells the stakeholders less about the work remaining. No where can I find a stated purpose of Agile or scrum to be making the team “feel better.” In practice, by masking the amount of business value being delivered, the opposite is probably true. The scrum framework ruthlessly exposes all the unhelpful and counterproductive practices and behaviors an unproductive team may be unconsciously perpetuating.

Forty points of genuine business value delivered at the end of a sprint is 100% of rubber on the road. Forty points delivered of which 10 are points assigned to one or more spikes is 75% of rubber on the road. The spike points are slippage. If they are left unpointed then it is clear what is happening. A spike here and there isn’t likely to have a significant impact on the velocity trend over 8 or 10 sprints, for example. One or more spikes per sprint is another matter. In this case, numerous spikes in successive sprints will likely cause the velocity to sink. If this happens, a number of corrective actions can be taken – actions that may be missed if the velocity is falsely kept at a certain desired or expected value. In other words, pointing spikes hides important information that could very well impact the success of the project. Bad news can inspire better decisions and corrective action. Falsely positive news most often leads to failures of the epic variety.

Consider the following two scenarios.

Team A has decided to add story points to their spikes. Immediately they run into several significant challenges related to the design and the technology choices made. So they create a number of spikes to find the answers and make some informed decision. The design and technology struggles continue for the next 10 sprints. Even with the challenges they faced, the team appears to have quickly established a stable velocity.

The burndown, however, looks like this:

If the scrum master were to use just the velocity numbers it would appear Team A is going to finish their work in about 14 sprints. This might be true if Team A were to have no more spikes in the remaining sprints. The trend, however, strongly suggests that’s not likely to happen. If a team has been struggling with design and technical issues for 10 sprints, it is unlikely those struggles will suddenly stop at sprint 11 or beyond unless there have been deliberate efforts to mitigate that potential. By pointing spikes and generating a nice-looking velocity chart it is more probable that Team A is unaware of the extent to which they may be underestimating the amount of time to complete items in the backlog.



Team B finds themselves in exactly the same situation as Team A. They immediately run into several significant challenges related to the design and the technology choices made and create a number of spikes to find the answers and make some informed decision. However, they decided not to add story points to their spikes. The design and technology struggles continue for the next 10 sprints. The data show that Team B is clearly struggling to establish a stable velocity.


And the burndown looks like this, same as Team A after 10 sprints:

However, it looks like it’s going to take Team B 21 more sprints to complete the work. That they’re struggling isn’t good. That it’s clear they struggling is very good. This isn’t apparent with Team A’s velocity chart. Since it’s clear they are struggling it is much easier to start asking questions, find the source of the agony, and make changes that will have a positive impact. It is also much more probably that the changes will be effective because they will have been based on solid information as to what the issues are. Less guess work involved with Team B than with Team A.

However, any scrum master worth their salt is going to notice that the product backlog burndown doesn’t align with the velocity chart. It isn’t burning down as fast as the velocity chart suggests it should be. So the savvy Team A scrum master starts tracking the burndown of value-add points vs spike points. Doing so might look like the following burndown:

Using the average from the parsed burndown, it is much more likely that Team A will need 21 additional sprints to complete the work. And for Team B?

The picture of the future based on the backlog burndown is a close match to the picture from the velocity data, about 22 sprints to complete the work.

If you were a product owner, responsible for keeping the customer informed of progress, which set of numbers would you want to base your report on? Would you rather surprise the customer with a “sudden” and extended delay or would you rather communicate openly and accurately?


Leaving spikes unpointed…

  • Increases the probability that performance metrics will reveal problems sooner and thus allow for corrective actions to be taken earlier in a project.
  • The team’s velocity and backlog burndown is a more accurate reflection of value actually being created for the customer and therefore allows for greater confidence of any predictions based on the metrics.

I’m interested in hearing your position on whether or not spikes should be estimated with story points (or some other measure.) I’m particularly interested in hearing where my thinking described in this article is in need of updating.

[An earlier version of this article originally appeared on the Agile Alliance blog.]

Agile Money

In a recent conversation with colleagues we were debating the merits of using story point velocity as a metric for team performance and, more specifically, how it relates to determining a team’s predictability. That is to say, how reliable the team is at completing the work they have promised to complete. At one point, the question of what is a story point came up and we hit on the idea of story points not being “points” at all. Rather, they are more like currency. This solved a number of issues for us.

First, it interrupts the all too common assumption that story points (and by extension, velocities) can be compared between teams. Experienced scrum practitioners know this isn’t true and that nothing good can come from normalizing story points and sprint velocities between teams. And yet this is something non-agile savvy management types are want to do. Thinking of a story’s effort in terms of currency carries with it the implicit assumption that one team’s “dollars” are not another team’s “rubles” or another teams “euros.” At the very least, an exchange evaluation would need to occur. Nonetheless, dollars, rubles, and euros convey an agreement of value, a store of value that serves as a reliable predictor of exchange. X number of story points will deliver Y value from the product backlog.

The second thing thinking about effort as currency accomplished was to clarify the consequences of populating the product backlog with a lot of busy work or non-value adding work tasks. By reducing the value of the story currency, the measure of the level of effort becomes inflated and the ability of the story currency to function as a store of value is diminished.

There are a host of other interesting economics derived thought experiments that can be played out with this frame around story effort. What’s the effect of supply and demand on available story currency (points)? What’s the state of the currency supply (resource availability)? Is there such a thing as counterfeit story currency? If so, what’s that look like? How might this mesh with the idea of technical or dark debt?

Try this out at your next backlog refinement session (or whenever it is you plan to size story efforts): Ask the team what you would have to pay them in order to complete the work. Choose whatever measure you wish – dollars, chickens, cookies – and use that as a basis for determining the effort needed to complete the story. You might also include in the conversation the consequences to the team – using the same measures – if they do not deliver on their promise.

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash

Root Causes

The sage business guru Willie Sutton might answer the question “Why must we work so hard at digging to finding the causes to our problems?” by observing “Because that’s where the roots are.”
Digging to find root causes is hard work. They’re are rarely obvious and there’s never just one. Occasionally, you might get lucky and trip over an obvious root cause (obvious once you’ve tripped over it.) Most often, it’ll require some unknown amount of exploration and experimentation.

Even so, I’ve watch as people work very hard to avoid the hard work needed to find root causes or fail to acknowledge them even when they are wrapped around their ankles. It’s an odd form of bikeshedding whereby the seemingly obvious major issues are ignored in favor of issues that are much easier to identify, explain, or understand.

One thing is certain, you’ll know you’ve found a root cause when one of two things happen: You implement a change meant to correct the issue and a whole lot of other things get fixed as a result or there is noisy and aggressive resistance to change.

Poor morale, for example, is often a presenting symptom mistaken for a root cause. The inexperienced (or lazy) will throw fixes at poor morale like money, happy hours, or other trinkets. These work in the very short term and have their place in a manager’s toolbox, but eventually more money becomes the new low pay and more alcohol has it’s own very steep downside.

Morale is best understood as a signal for measuring the health of the underlying system. Poor morale is a signal that a whole lot of things are going wrong and that they’ve been going wrong for an extended period of time. By leveraging a system dynamics approach, it’s relatively easy to make some educated guesses about where the root causes may be. That’s the easy part.

The hard work lies with figuring out what interventions to implement and determining how to measure whether or not the changes are having the desired effect. A positive shift in morale would certainly be one of the indicators. But since it is a lagging indicator on the scale of months, it would be important to include several other measures that are more closely associated with the selected interventions.

There are other systemic symptoms that are relatively easy to identify and track. Workforce turnover, rework, and delays in delivery of high dependency work products are just a couple of examples. Each of these would suggest a different approach needed to resolve the underlying issues and restore balance to the system dynamics behind a team or organization’s performance.

Concave, Convex, and Nonlinear Fragility

Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s book, “Antifragile,” is a wealth of information. I’ve returned to it often since first reading it several years ago. My latest revisit has been to better understand his ideas about representing the nonlinear and asymmetric aspects of fragile/antifragile in terms of “concave” and “convex.” My first read of this left me a bit confused, but I got the gist of it and moved on. Taleb is a very smart guy so I need to understand this.

The first thing I needed to sort out on this revisit was Taleb’s use of language. The fragile/antifragile comparison is variously described in his book as:

  • Concave/Convex
  • Slumped solicitor/Humped solicitor
  • Curves inward/Curves outward
  • Frown/Smile
  • Negative convexity effects/Positive convexity effects
  • Pain more than gain/Gain more than pain
  • Doesn’t “like” volatility (presumable)/”Likes” volatility

Tracking his descriptions is made a little more challenging by reversals in reference when writing of both together (concave and convex then convex and concave) and mis-matches between the text and illustrations. For example:

Nonlinearity comes in two kinds: concave (curves inward), as in the case of the king and the stone, or its opposite, convex (curves outward). And of course, mixed, with concave and convex sections. (note the order: concave / convex) Figures 10 and 11 show the following simplifications of nonlinearity: the convex and the concave resemble a smile and a frown, respectively. (note the order: convex / concave)

Figure 10 shows:

So, “convex, curves outward” is illustrated as an upward curve and “concave, curves inward” is illustrated as a downward curve. Outward is upward and inward is downward. It reads like a yoga pose instruction or a play-by-play call for a game of a Twister.

After this presentation, Taleb simplifies the ideas:

I use the term “convexity effect” for both, in order to simplify the vocabulary, saying “positive convexity effects” and “negative convexity effects.”

This was helpful. The big gain is when Taleb gets to the math and graphs what he’s talking about. Maybe the presentation to this point is helpful to non-math thinkers, but for me it was more obfuscating than illuminating. My adaptation of the graphs presented by Taleb:

With this picture, it’s easier for me to understand the non-linear relationship between a variable’s volatility and fragility vs antifragility. The rest of the chapter is easier to understand with this picture of the relationships in mind.