Effective monitoring of progress of agile software development teams in modern software companies: an industrial case study

Background: The last ten to fifteen years, there has been a change in the way modern software organizations and companies work. The "classic" set-up with a project, where the project leader together with his/her project management team set up a time plan and execute on it, has been replaced by autonomous software development teams. Traditionally, measures were given top down, but now teams are asked to define and follow-up on their progress, by establishing their own measures. Goal: The goal of our research is to develop a set of measures for software development teams, addressing the research question of What should software development teams measure, to effectively monitor their progress? Method: We use an action research collaborative project with an infrastructure provider company. We developed the measures together with nine agile software development teams, using survey of needs, workshops about requirements, development of a dashboard and its evaluation in a mature measurement program. Results: The results show that the five measures we developed, in three different areas, cover the most important needs of agile software development teams for effective monitoring of their progress. Conclusions: Based of the results, we conclude that using the set of measures developed, software development teams can effectively monitor their progress. The limited number of areas monitored and measures used, limits the effort that the teams have to put on developing and monitoring these measures.