Metrics to Support Continuous Improvement

Lisa Crispin is back at TSQA! We're excited to welcome her to talk about how we can drive continuous improvement!

Continuous improvement sounds good, but it can be really hard to do. Do your team's retrospectives end up with a long list of problems and not much action to address them? Do you feel like you're spending way too much time firefighting production issues and not enough time delivering new value? So many obstacles can block a team's quality journey.

A good way forward is doing small experiments to address your biggest problem. To know if your experiments are working, you need to measure. Lisa will share her technique for designing small experiments to chip away at the team's biggest problem. We'll focus on how to measure whether a given experiment is moving your team towards its goals.

One place to start is using the key metrics from Google's DORA team's research. They're an effective way to measure process quality and they apply in many contexts. We'll also discuss how your team can choose additional metrics that can be used to support your continuous
improvement initiatives. Lisa will share how her teams set goals and measured their performance and their happiness.

Learning takeaways:

• How to design small experiments to improve, with appropriate measurements to track progress
• Learn how to apply metrics in your context to identify problem areas such as process bottlenecks and code quality
• Learn about DORA key metrics, and creating your own metrics, to help track progress

Lisa Crispin is an independent consultant, author and speaker based in Vermont, USA. Together with Janet Gregory, Lisa co-founded the Agile Testing Fellowship. They developed two courses, “Holistic Testing: Strategies for Agile Teams”, and “Holistic Testing for Continuous Delivery: For a quality DevOps Culture”, which are offered by selected training providers around the world.

Lisa uses her long experience working as a tester on high-performing agile teams to help organizations assess and improve their quality practices, and succeed with continuous delivery. She’s a DORA guide for Google’s DORA Community of Practice.