What is the project’s most important vital sign to help assess the health status of the project?

Question

Just like people have vital signs (e.g. temperature, heart rate, blood pressure and respiratory function); What vital signs are needed to collect and track to help assess the overall health of the project?

There is no clear winner based on today's voting (June 2009).

Answer 1

The happiness of the programmer, daily builds and bug reports / corrections all come to mind immediately.

Answer 2

WTF per minute.

alt text http://www.osnews.com/images/comics/wtfm.jpg

Answer 3

From the point of view of a programmer (i.e., a non-manager), I am most interested in working functions. Tracking progress in terms of function implementation is perhaps one of the only relevant statistics that apply; everything else may be masked too easily.

Answer 4

The number of user complaints.

The ability for users to report errors is a prerequisite.

Answer 5

Number of mistakes.

Answer 6

(the number of original developers is still in the project) / (the number of original developers is at the beginning of the project)

; -)

Answer 7

• The project team is confident that the volume and quality of the project can be achieved on time and on budget. You can easily check by accidentally asking how people feel (as opposed to thoughts) about current progress and goals. Also listen and speak when people rant and complain.

• Constant active support from project stakeholders. As soon as interested parties begin to distance themselves from the project, do not want to participate in the decision-making process, spend as much time as before, or take responsibility for parts of the project, this means that everything starts to become sour. Successful, worthy projects, as a rule, attract new stakeholders who do not lose their existence. Another test is to keep asking how they feel about this and whether they are happy with the success they have achieved. Address any misfortune.

Internal measures, such as earned value, speed, LOC, written and verified, unresolved issues, completed functional points, degree of deviation from the original plan, etc., are useful for monitoring health status; however, none of them says whether the project will survive. In my experience, two main things are the active support from the project sponsor and other external stakeholders and the team’s confidence that this thing can still be achieved.

Answer 8

Iron Triangle ... area, graph and budget. Focus on only one, and you have a problem.

Answer 9

My suggestion probably sounds strange, but if you think about it, this is a pretty good sign of a healthy project. How good are your unit tests?

Think about it. This means: 1) you have unit tests 2) you probably have requirements 3) you probably have a design 4) your code is broken down into “units” that can be tested 5) your devices are well defined for testing

and

6) you will have immediate feedback about future changes

Answer 10

You want to measure the progress of the project in terms of the value provided to (potential) customers, so I would include a measure for this in your life attributes.

One that comes to mind (we use scrum and use history points to measure the size of the function)

story_points_completed / remaining_story_points 

During the project, both will grow: story points completed as a result of the work of team members, remaining story points due to new or changing requirements. What you want to control is that story_points_completed / remaining_story_points increasing and not decreasing.