Metrics and measurement are important in software development projects. They are needed for planning, budgeting, organizing and controlling the work. They are also necessary for continuous improvement.
Scrum provides three main metrics: Velocity, Sprint Burn down and Release Burn up. These metrics focus mainly on the development team and on the product. They don’t directly address the cost of the project.
In this article I present SPOC (Story POint Cost) as a metric to measure and track the cost of user stories and consequently the cost of Agile projects. I have developed the SPOC metric during my different interventions as an Agile/Scrum consultant. The metric has been used in several projects during the last three years. The main objectives of the SPOC metric are the following:
Provide the Scrum teams (and managers) with a simple means for measuring and tracking the development cost all along the project.
Having a concrete measure of story point cost will reinforce team awareness about the budget. This allows the team to register cost reduction among its objectives of continuous improvement.
Keeping a history of the costs will allow more accurate budget estimates for future projects (Estimation based on teams experience).
