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0 pointsGordonS8y ago0 comments

What's the issue with story points and velocity? I've been using them for years and personally I think they're some of the best parts of agile!

0 comments

crdoconnor8y ago

Your team's velocity going up can mean that:

* Your team did more work this week.

* Your team worked more efficiently this week.

* Your team inflated its story point estimations this week.

Any one or all of those things could have happened in varying degrees.

Given all of that, what useful knowledge is it actually supposed to impart?

The best part is the number of story points / velocity can vary wildly depending upon what the team believes the measure is being used for.

GordonSOP8y ago

In my experience, if you track velocity long enough, and 'categorise' the values based on things like team size, technology etc, you get values that are useful to predict how much work you should commit to in an iteration.

Yes, things change: productivity, moral, team members join and leave, some teams are shit at estimating etc - but at least in my experience if you take an average you do arrive at a useful figure.

crdoconnor8y ago

In my experience if you have some sort of measure that looks a bit like productivity then senior management will latch on to it and treat it as a proxy for productivity.

That inevitably means that developers have an incentive to inflate their estimates, which means story point inflation.

Averaging does not fix this dynamic.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

crdoconnor8y ago

Your team's velocity going up can mean that:

* Your team did more work this week.

* Your team worked more efficiently this week.

* Your team inflated its story point estimations this week.

Any one or all of those things could have happened in varying degrees.

Given all of that, what useful knowledge is it actually supposed to impart?

The best part is the number of story points / velocity can vary wildly depending upon what the team believes the measure is being used for.

GordonSOP8y ago

Yes, things change: productivity, moral, team members join and leave, some teams are shit at estimating etc - but at least in my experience if you take an average you do arrive at a useful figure.

crdoconnor8y ago

In my experience if you have some sort of measure that looks a bit like productivity then senior management will latch on to it and treat it as a proxy for productivity.

That inevitably means that developers have an incentive to inflate their estimates, which means story point inflation.

Averaging does not fix this dynamic.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse