Measuring in an Agile System Development Process : A Case Study in Health IT

Abstract: The basic aim for any software development organization is to maximize value creation for any given investment. To amplify and speed up value creation efforts, Agile Software Development has gained much popularity during the last decade as a response to a volatile and disruptive market. In an Agile environment, the team focuses on lightweight working practices, constant deliveries and customer collaboration rather than heavy documentation and inflexible processes. However, the Agile way of working has complicated how an organization can control and evaluate the process; allowing organizations to believe that all Agile processes is the ideal process. This master thesis was conducted as a case study at Sectra ImIT, an Agile Health IT company working with Imaging and IT solutions that is currently in an early phase of introducing metrics in the System Development process. The purpose of this thesis was to investigate and suggest how the organization could use metrics to control and evaluate value creation in the System Development process. It also aimed to provide strategic recommendations to such an organization how they could continue their work with implementing and using metrics. The descriptive and exploratory purpose of this study was realized through unstructured and semistructured interviews with people involved in the process as well as observations. One of the major findings in this thesis is related to a missing feedback loop from defects occurring at customer site to the internal System Development process. Therefore, this study developed and implemented a concept to generate this feedback. The concept builds on defect information that can be used both to generate feedback and statistics for evaluation. The second major finding in this study is related to the identification of barriers to why the organization is not using metrics in teams to control and evaluate the process. Based on these findings, the authors presented several recommendations that should be considered to create a culture where teams are using metrics to learn more about the process. The first recommendation is that the organization should set guidelines among teams of what should, and is desired to be evaluated with focus on information need. Secondly, metrics need to be higher prioritized through directives from management granting team’s resources to manage metrics, which at the same time provides incentives that the organization believe metrics could improve their work. Thirdly, based on the company context, teams should identify metrics based on an information need derived from their prioritizations, changes, decisions and what is currently left unanswered. Finally, metrics should primarily be used to provide means for discussion and provide feedback with focus on trends rather than absolute numbers.