Agile Value Management for Coöperatie DELA

The Issue at hand

DELA's Reservation System — a mission-critical application built on .NET, HTML5, and SQL — was developed and maintained by an external, partly nearshore (Serbia-based) team paid on a time-and-materials basis. DELA management needed objective, ongoing visibility into that team's productivity, cost efficiency, and code quality, rather than relying on hours billed alone.

The Service Provided

IDC Metri ran Agile Value Management (AVM) as a quarterly measurement cycle, combining:

• A CAST Software system-level code quality baseline against ISO 25010, ISO 5055, and other international standards and best practices, first measured on 1 September 2021.

• A concrete Improvement Plan of 36 prioritized actions addressing every critical violation found.

• Team performance metrics — productivity, cost efficiency, delivery speed, and process quality — calculated each period using Enhancement Function Points (functionality added, modified, and removed) and benchmarked against a peer group of 15,000+ data points.

• Repeat measurements on a quarterly cadence, tracked on portfolio- and team-level Power BI dashboards.

The outcomes achieved

The baseline measurement found 130 Critical Violations against international coding standards, two of them top priority. One month later, after the team worked through the Improvement Plan, only 4 remained — and all were later resolved, taking the application to zero critical violations and zero incidents. Team performance was well above market average from the very first measurement: a Productivity Index of 35%, Cost Efficiency Index of 49%, Delivery Speed Index of 75%, and Process Quality Index of 96%. Across six repeat measurements, DELA management gained full visibility into a team paid on a time-and-materials basis, with confidence that both value for money and software quality stayed high.

Deliverables

• Health Dashboard: Quarterly scores on Robustness, Efficiency, Security, Changeability, and Transferability, rolled up into a Total Quality Index.

• Engineering Dashboard & Improvement Plan: Code-level detail on every critical violation, why it matters, and how to fix it — turned into 36 prioritized actions.

• AVM Team Performance Dashboard: Productivity, cost efficiency, delivery speed, and process quality, trended over time and benchmarked to industry peers.