What metrics should an Agile team use to measure health instead of just Velocity?

All answers to this question.

Check your "Say/Do Ratio." It measures how much of the work you committed to actually got finished. It’s a great indicator of how well the team understands their own capacity.

   Answered 2024-05-30 by Cynthia Rogers

• Great point, Cynthia. A high Say/Do ratio builds trust with stakeholders faster than a high velocity ever will. It shows you are a predictable and reliable team.

     Commented 2025-06-01 by Angela Thompson

Velocity is a capacity planning tool, not a performance metric. You should look at "Cycle Time"—the time it takes for a single story to go from 'In Progress' to 'Done.' Shorter cycle times usually mean a healthier process. Also, track "Escaped Defects" to measure quality in production. For value, consider "Business Value Delivered" per sprint, which you can assign during planning. Lastly, don't ignore "Team Happiness" or morale. A happy team is more sustainable and productive. Use anonymous surveys or "Niko-Niko calendars" to track the emotional pulse of your developers over time.

   Answered 2025-05-24 by Angela Thompson

Cycle time is a game-changer, but how do you present these 'soft' metrics like team happiness to a traditional CFO who only understands story points and timelines? Do you have a way to correlate high morale with lower turnover costs or higher quality outputs to make the business case?

   Answered 2025-05-26 by Kevin Barker

• Kevin, I actually show the correlation between our "Sprint Happiness Score" and our "Bug Count." When morale drops, bugs go up—every single time. Once the CFO saw that unhappy developers lead to expensive production hotfixes, they started taking our 'health' metrics much more seriously.

     Commented 2025-05-28 by Rebecca Foster