Metrics Functions for Kanban Guards

Agile and lean approaches favor self-organizing teams that use low-tech solutions for communicating and negotiating project content and scope in software projects. We consider this approach to have many benefits, but we also recognize that there is information in software projects that does not readily lend itself to low-tech types of visualization. Different characteristics of the code base is one such example. In this paper, we outline metrics functions that can take advantage of more advanced information of the development artifacts and provide the lean or agile team with partially automated decision support for quality assurance actions.