Frequent inspection and adaptation are indispensable elements of any successful agile development undertaking. Our focus for measuring should be those things directly related to the delivery of working software that is valuable to the customer. Inspecting aggregated, system-level data relevant to this overarching objective can help keep us from dwelling on lower-level, suboptimal measures that could actually detract from the larger goal. Moreover, by observing trends, we have the opportunity to use the direction of (and changes in the direction of) the trends as leading indicators that can help us course-correct effectively, rather than lagging indicators that are of no value in ensuring the success of a project that is underway.

The Iteration Burndown (a standard for Scrum teams) and Cumulative Flow are two of the most commonly-used trend charts in agile project management.   Other commonly-used measures are “Running, Tested Features” and “Passing Automated Tests”, with a decrease in either, of course, being a possible cause for concern. For teams practicing an iteration-less agile approach, Cycle Time is a key metric, whereby a trend of increasing cycle times would be an indication that something needs to be addressed. 

In addition to tracking a standard set of trends, a team or organization might also temporarily measure a trend as a diagnostic to try to understand and resolve a specific issue. As with any metric, before setting out to track a trend, it is important to understand how the data will be used, and how that measurement will support the higher-level objective of delivering working software that is valuable to the customer.