Monitor your team capability. Balance demand with capacity. Understand your performance trends.
Throughput measures the number of your completed work items over the course of a specific time frame. The Throughput Histogram for Azure DevOps outlines the shape of your throughput frequency distribution. It reveals basic information about your dataset, including your median value, the width of the spread and the overall distribution for your completed work.
Tracking throughput using the Throughput Histogram for Azure DevOps enables you to accurately evaluate your team’s ability to deliver results.
With the Throughput Histogram for Azure DevOps, you can oversee your team performance by evaluating the average number of work items that were completed on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
Your capacity to deliver is represented by your average throughput. In a dataset with a number of outliers, the mean will be skewed up or down. If you spot this pattern, use the median value to assess your team’s performance.
In the Throughput Histogram for Azure DevOps, you have the option to exclude throughout zero values due to non-work days including weekends, public holidays, vacations etc.
It is useful to be aware of your average throughput calculated both with and without weekend values. Including the zero values will give you an accurate representation of your performance over a longer timescale, whilst removing them will expose your throughput average for a typical business day.
The graph’s percentile lines illustrate your past performance data. The percentiles enable you to define the number of work items you can deliver on a daily, weekly or monthly basis and the likelihood of that commitment being met.
Use your throughput performance metrics to perform short term commitments. Remember, every forecast comes with the probability of the commitment being fulfilled.
The ‘Throughput Averages’ widget shows your throughput mean, median and mode values to help you to understand the trends in your team delivery rates as they emerge. Ideally, the lines should increase smoothly while remaining close to each other.
Select an average and watch its line profile! Decreasing gradients indicate that your team is delivering less value. Make sure you have WIP limits in place in order to prevent bottlenecks from building up.