My own requests to get on sprint backlogs are often analytical – that whole measuring success thing, for a variety of reasons: (1) enhanced analytics the business didn’t realize would be needed when a feature or function originally went live (2) basic tagging that should have been included when a feature or function went live but didn’t make it into the original sprint(3) tag modifications made necessary by site changes (4) repairs to tags that worked in test but for some reason broke in production.

Save your comments, I know Scenario (4) shouldn’t happen. Neither should petroleum-coated pelicans, decaf espresso or the Heidi & Spencer union, but hey, what can I tell ya?

Delivering working software is priority numero uno in an Agile development environment. Now analytical tagging is software, but it’s not the kind you can point to on a screen when your buddies are over and say “See that page? That was me.” So how will you get it prioritized over the other coding projects that result in something you can screenshot and put into a slide presentation? Or a developer’s resume? Or a fellow marketer’s resume?

Marketing has to lead the way in fostering a corporate culture that values the measurement of success as an integral and non-removable part of any website initiative. A healthy Agile environment begets continuous improvement – and continuous improvement requires baselines and monitoring to keep score.

If coding that enables measurement isn’t considered valuable software, then your analytical requests simply may not make it. Sexier coding tasks – the ones you can see, hear, click, monetize – will rise to the top of the sprint list – and your analytics request will go to shady, grassy section of the backlog to live with Jesus and Ronnie James Dio.

Tracking the success of what you build is not an enhancement or a feature or an add-on. It’s what marketers and developers need so they will know what to do next to dynamically enhance performance. And what could be sexier than enhanced performance?