Flow Metrics: Reading the Story Your Work is Telling You - AgileLnL - Mark Shead

The British Raj wanted fewer cobras, and decided to use dead cobras as a proxy metric for fewer living deadly snakes. In the end, they ended up with MORE cobras, not fewer. Metrics drive behavior, for better and for worse. In this session we'll look at flow metrics as an attempt to quantify what actually matters to the business instead of what happens to be easy to measure. We'll go through the DORA metrics and how they hold speed and stability in tension, then turn to the newest version of an old problem: measuring AI-assisted development, where lines of code, tokens burned, etc. are all metrics that can drive both desired and undesired behavior.