15. About the authors

15.1 Mattia Battiston

Mattia is originally from Verona, the city of love and home of Romeo of Juliet. He is a software developer and team leader with a great passion for learning and continuous improvement.

His focus is to help teams strive to get better, using Kanban, Lean, Agile, and of course a lot of data and metrics.

He’s been interested in everything to do with Agile since the beginning of his career in 2008. He loves attending and speaking at conferences and meetups for sharing experiences and learning from each other.

15.2 Chris Young

Chris has been a computerist since age 12 when he was introduced to the magic of the Commodore PET. He works with engineering and management teams with the aim of getting the best results possible for all involved.

The role and value of metrics in this came from discovering the Lean/Kanban community around 2010 which got him measuring things in earnest.

He is an active member of the Lean/Agile/DevOps community speaking at Meet Ups and conferences across Europe including GOTO Berlin, Agile Cambridge, CukeUp and QCon.

15.3 Why we wrote this book

Mattia: having experimented with data and metrics for a long time, I wanted to write this book to share what worked for me and help people learn from my mistakes. Metrics have massively helped me and my teams make better decisions, have better discussions, and improve every day. I hope that reading this book will help others achieve the same, if not more.

Chris: I wanted to share my success and failure in using metrics to improve the work and outcomes of the various teams I’ve been involved in. Having a foot in both the technology and business camps I have seen how shared metrics can provide a foundation for better communication and understanding and so lead to better outcomes. It’s really important to me that this is a nurturing and helpful book and, like the work, it’s very much a team effort.