The new solution, underpinned by the ConnectALL platform it acquired in June 2023, gathers, organizes and evaluates disparate DORA and flow metrics to provide real-time, role-based dashboards to development teams, dev managers and organization leaders to use for informed decision-making.  

“By integrating and organizing data from diverse sources across the value chain, ValueOps Insights provides the information organizations need to make better business decisions,” said Jean-Louis Vignaud, Head of ValueOps in Broadcom’s Agile Operations Division. The ability to match investment with the capability to deliver products leads to “successful value realization,” the company noted in its announcement.

This enables monitoring of investment decisions against product outcomes, and confirmation that planned product capabilities translate into tangible investment outcomes. By aligning investment intent with execution capability, we help organizations ensure successful value realization.

DORA and Flow metrics are all about delivery efficiency, but Vignaud noted, “that doesn’t mean we’re smart in what we do. The ideal view of the word is, ‘I plan for value, I deliver value and I measure the value realization.” While the full vision for Insights includes a value planning tool that will be integrated in the next quarter, Vignuad said, “We can start to be a bit smarter because of Flow analytics and DORA metrics.”

To broaden the value proposition, Broadcom is working on value realization. As Vignaud explained, “We capture early metrics, ensuring that indeed you are realizing the value you said you would be realizing when you do the investment.” 

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Because of that, before you can even begin to measure how your team is performing, it’s critically important to understand your organization’s approach to development and how the teams are structured to maximize that effort.

“Finding good metrics, like flow metrics, end up being a balance between … do you treat what developers are doing as a manufacturing process? Or do you treat it more as a creative process?” said Jeremy Freeman, co-founder and CTO at Allstacks, providers of value stream intelligence software.  

Freeman referred back to the “Iron Triangle” approach to software development quality, which states that you can either develop things quickly, cheaply or at high quality, and everything between them is a tradeoff. 

This approach, he said, can also apply to flow metrics. 

Organizations can optimize more toward speed and predictability, or they can optimize toward data science and problem-solving. “These types of tradeoffs actually permeate all of your business decisions as technology leaders,” he said. “Do you focus on fixing quality? Or do you focus on fixing or shipping new features? And the flow metrics that are now a core component of the SAFe Framework end up having their own sorts of these ‘Flow Triangles.’ There’s your velocity, cycle time and team load. You always want to have really high-velocity routines. And that is intimately linked to how long it takes you to do things, and how many things are being worked on at once?”

Many high-functioning organizations have different teams working at different speeds, using different processes and tools, so coordinating that work is critical. “Thinking about flow metrics as a way to help make sure teams are working together is really important,” Freeman said. “If you imagine a team working on delivering a sprint goal, then you take a step back and think about how the collection of teams is working against shipping a major feature. You have to think about how fast things are getting delivered, and how that impacts your ship time. Are the levers you have to play with as a leader right? So these metrics are really helpful, and flow is really apt.”

Freeman recommends that organizations first figure out where their problems are, with the development team and all stakeholders. Then you can start measuring some coarse things around outcomes, and as you start identifying potential solutions, then you can get tighter and tighter with what you’re measuring. 

He noted that in talking to development teams, it seems like their biggest bottleneck is getting pull requests across the line. “There’s a high cycle time, no one will review my pull request, and that’s preventing us from actually shifting work,” he said. “In the pull request example,” he said, “maybe we’ll go from measuring your request cycle time to measuring how long it takes to get your first review, to know how long it takes you to actually complete any review cycle. And as you build those metrics up, you’ll actually get better information and start to pinpoint and solve problems.” 

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“To stay competitive, you need a handle on the end-to-end value flow through each product’s software delivery value stream,” said Nicole Bryan, Tasktop’s VP product.  “Software is not the core competency of most enterprises, yet software is critical to their success. Tasktop helps software delivery organizations generate more value by connecting and measuring end-to-end flow.”

“The first step to understanding, managing and measuring end-to-end flow is integrating your tool chain,” said Bryan.  “Tasktop enables enterprises to integrate all of the tools and teams in the software delivery process. If you can see and measure flow, you can improve it,” Bryan added.

Integrate the DevOps tool chain
Large organizations rely on multiple tools to design, develop and operate software, with each tool designed to increase productivity of a specific role. “Software is not just about writing code,” said Bryan. “There are tools for planning, prioritizing, analyzing and designing requirements, testing, scanning, and deploying.”

Tasktop enables data exchange and synchronization across these tools to eliminate manual duplication, human-errors and delays and gain unprecedented visibility into the entire software delivery process to help business and IT leaders identify costly bottlenecks and opportunities to improve.

“You can’t fix bottlenecks if you don’t have visibility into the entire flow,” said Bryan. “If you’re not integrating all tools and teams, it’s impossible to see what is actually going on.”

“Organizations must make assumptions about what they can do to improve, because they don’t have the complete picture. They may decide to improve their testing process, when actually it’s their design process that is the bottleneck. Without end-to-end visibility, they can’t know that. Tasktop shines a light on the entire system, to help them to identify where investments will truly move the needle.”

Prove value in business terms
One of the biggest challenges IT organizations face is finding a common language with the business.

“The business thinks about the value they’re bringing customers and the business outcomes they are trying to achieve,” said Bryan. “IT thinks about how to get it done using existing resources. That requires breaking the work down into many technical tasks and implementation details. Tasktop helps IT see those details while abstracting them to concepts of value, which the business understands.”

“Software delivery organizations need to account for the business value they create, which is expressed in features delivered, defects fixed and security issues resolved,” said Bryan.  “When viewed side by side with desired business outcomes, IT and business leaders can make joint decisions on how to improve, adjust and calibrate to meet objectives. That’s what value stream management is, and what IT leadership is looking for.”

Five key metrics
There are five Flow Metrics that measure how value flows through a product’s value stream. They are calculated on four Flow Items – units of work organizations should want to measure: features, defects, debt, and risk. Any work a software delivery organization undertakes can be categorized as one of these core Items.

The Flow Metrics are:

• Flow Velocity: The number of Flow Items of each type completed over a period of time.
  This metric is used to gauge whether value delivery is accelerating. Also referred to as throughput.
• Flow Distribution: The ratio of the four Flow Items completed in particular window of time.
  This metric is used to prioritize specific types of work during specific time frames to meet a desired business outcome.
• Flow Time: The end-to-end time interval it takes for Flow Items to go from ‘work start’ to ‘work complete’, including active and wait times. This metric identifies when time to value is getting longer.
• Flow Load: The number of Flow Items in progress (active or waiting) within a value stream. This metric monitors over or under-utilization of value streams.
• Flow Efficiency: The percentage of time Flow Items are actively worked on out of the total time elapsed. This metric identifies when waste is increasing or decreasing.

More than 1,000 organizations around the globe, including 43 of the Fortune 100 and 300,000 customers, rely on Tasktop to accelerate their software delivery capabilities. For more information visit www.tasktop.com.

Content provided by SD Times and Tasktop

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