Transparency

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Definition

Transparency is the result of the sum of measures to make all necessary, interesting, and potentially motivating details known to every employee or member of the project. This includes efforts of making potentially “frightening” details easy to understand for any audience (e.g. present technical details of deployments in a way the business managers and sales people understand). As a result, the audience should have a real, authentic, non-misleading understanding of the current state of the product (or project phase).

In software development tool-driven approaches like the use of Continuous Integration servers, Static Code Analysis tools, and data from project management software provide enough data to give significant insight via company dashboards or the like.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Software:

  • lines of code (growth over time-span, potential maintenance effort)
  • test coverage (percentage of functionality secured by tests; percentage secured by automated tests vs. manual tests vs. none; number of test passing vs. failing)
  • static software health (errors, smell, coding style violations from code analysis, trend)
  • software health in production (CPU load, RAM usage, number of exceptions, etc. over time-span)

Project:

  • user stories / story points (total completed vs. in product backlog)
  • code reviews / pull request (percentage of stories reviewed vs. not reviewed)
  • accepted user stories (accepted vs. rejected in sprint review)
  • bugs (opened and fixed, total number, growth over time-span)
  • implementation effort (time estimated vs. time tracked)
  • velocity (total story points completed each sprint, averaged over available team members and time)

See Also

External Resources

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