Happiness Metric¶

As a framework, Agile emphasizes teamwork in software development and recognizes it’s human aspect. Delivering innovative, high quality work at a steady pace requires motivated, involved and happy teams. The happiness metric measures happiness as an indicator of team well-being. The assumption is that happiness is strongly correlated with team well-being. So, a team that’s happy, will also be more efficient, more cohesive, more ready for the tasks at hand and will deliver higher quality work. If people are unhappy, something needs to be done. After all, team well-being is what we are really interested in.

Scrum focuses on incremental improvements. It is natural to come up with long lists of things that are supposed to help improve motivation or pace. However, people often feel disconnected to these long lists and having many options to choose from actually changes the emotional state: pushing it towards "negative emotions." People lose motivation to make the items work. So you need to work on the right improvement, and the team must feel some passion about the improvement. That's what the Happiness Metric does.

Rules:¶

1. Each person in the group answers the 4 questions below. Ideally, the entire team will be assembled and it will be an open, comfortable environment.
2. Once everyone shares, the team comes up with a list of things that could change. This exposes what is most important to each member, and what they think is most important for the company.
3. The team then takes the top improvement and makes it the most important thing to do in the next Sprint. Acceptance criteria is created with the following questions: How can you prove you've made that improvement? What are the concrete, actionable items?

Group Questions:¶

1. On a scale from 1 to 5, how do you feel about your role in the company?
2. On the same scale, how do you feel about the company as a whole?
3. Why do you feel that way?
4. What one thing would make you happier in the next Sprint?

Useful Tips:¶

• Should be done weekly
• This is different from a retrospective and review. Rather than looking at what we got done and how we could improve, the happiness metric targets team well-being.
• The resulting action should be able to be acted upon within the next week. If it requires more time or is too ambiguous to create success criteria, it is an indicator that the discussion should go deeper to isolate true feelings behind a statement.