Agile Team Benchmarking

Why measure functionality delivered?

When the industry moved from traditional application development to agile ways of working, transparency of team performance dropped significantly due to the lack of objective, standardized metrics.

Many (agile) teams use non-standardized metrics like Story Points to estimate the work to be done in the next sprint and to understand velocity (e.g., Story Points per sprint). As Story Points is not a standardized unit of measure, metrics based on story points can't be used to benchmark or to aggregate into useful management information. In addition, as the figure above shows, teams assign story points to any activity that requires effort, also the activities that don't produce value for the user or customer, and which maybe could have been avoided in the first place. Therefore, many organizations suffer from a lack of transparency when it comes to the value delivery function.

Although it is impossible to measure actual business value, AgileBenchmark considers delivered functionality as a good proxy for business value.

Agile Team Benchmarking brings transparency and grip!

Our Agile Team Benchmarking service uses objective, standardized functional size measurement methods to measure the value delivered per sprint, release, and/or quarter. This way, we can compare the performance of each team against thousands of data points in our Agile Team Performance Database.

Approach

We select a measurement period for the benchmark and then use an ISO standard for functional size measurement to measure the size of the developed functionality in function points (FP). We collect data of the measurement period: most importantly, effort hours spent, the cost of these hours, and the defects found/resolved. This allows us to calculate the objective team performance metrics:

• Productivity (Project Delivery rate) hours per FP.

• Cost Efficiency: Cost per FP.

• Delivery Speed: FP delivered per month.

• Sprint Quality: Defects per FP.

These metrics are benchmarked against our database containing over 12000 data points.

In addition to the team performance measurement and benchmark, there are several other aspects of the team performance we can measure or evaluate. The exact content of an Agile Team Benchmarking project can be configured from several building blocks:

• Team Performance Measurement and Benchmark

• Assessment of the current way of working: adoption of industry best practices.

• Requirement quality analysis of user stories using automated technology.

• Evaluation of the estimation processes and predictability.

• Assessment of the Business Value Produced.

• Evaluation of Application Product Quality.

• Recommendations for improvement and optimization.

Benefits: objective measurement and benchmarking of the value delivery of your agile team(s)!

• Cross-Team Performance Insight: Compares productivity, cost efficiency, velocity, process quality, and predictability across teams using normalized, anonymized data from thousands of global squads.

• Context-Aware Benchmarking: Adjusts metrics for team size, domain complexity, and technology stack—eliminating invalid story point comparisons.

• Identifies Top Performers: Pinpoints high-velocity teams to extract reusable practices like test automation thresholds or effective pairing cadences.

• Flags Struggling Teams Early: Detects erratic cycle times or scope creep, signaling skill gaps, tech debt, or process breakdowns before they escalate.

• Drives Targeted Coaching: Directs improvement resources precisely where needed, avoiding blanket training waste.

• Prevents Misleading Metrics: Rejects cross-team story point equivalence, focusing on outcome-based KPIs that reflect true delivery capability.

• Reduces Delivery Risk: Enables leadership to rebalance workloads, staff strategically, and mitigate bottlenecks enterprise-wide.

• Accelerates Organizational Learning: Propagates proven agile patterns from elite teams to the broader portfolio.

• Supports Data-Driven Decisions: Replaces gut feel with statistical evidence for budgeting, hiring, and release planning.

Interested? Please leave us a message or request a quote: