PTM triplet for continuous improvement

As per Wikipedia, Continuous improvement process (abbreviated as CIP or CI), 
"is an ongoing effort to improve products, services, or processes. These efforts can seek "incremental" improvement over time or "breakthrough" improvement all at once.”

This post talks on how the PTM triplet is important for continuous improvement. PTM stands for practices, tools and metrics.

Agile practices as such may seem little cumbersome since it is required to have multiple checkpoints to ensure sanctity of the product under development. This can be made effective and efficient with tools usage. Hence, tools become an integral part of agile WoW (Way of Working). Usage of tools is a double edged sword. Though it helps in making job easier for team members, not having the right tools may in turn cause an opposite effect and later become an overhead for the team. Thus, it is important to identify and use right tools. The practices and tools are closely coupled in Agile WoW.

Usage of right tools help team in deriving proper metrics. These metrics helps the team with a feedback system on how the system is performing. Regular and timely feedback is critical for any system to change. i.e. for its continuous improvement.

Below is a high level view on PTM triplet:

Practices: Backlog grooming, daily standup, scrum of scrums, retrospectives, weekly releases, automated builds and test runs

Tools: Visual boards, redmine for bug logging, Hudson for hourly builds, static analyzer /code review tools, scripts for automation

Metrics: Lead time, cycle time for measuring team effectiveness, # of build failures in an iteration, # of reopened issues

The important point is to use the right tools, measure the right metrics and change things that do not work regularly.