The Myth of Velocity?

July 29, 2009

I just ran across an article on InfoQ discussing the phenomenon of hyper-productivity—one that tends to come up a lot in relation to agile practices and Scrum, in particular. Apparently, the Scrum Development Group has seen some lively debate erupt around the topic, as trainers such as Tobias Mayer suggest that any attempts to measure hyper-productivity is “a waste of time.” Certainly, I understand his suspicions over Jeff Sutherland’s claim in a recent presentation that to be hyper-productivity is constituted by a rate of 300 percent improvement over three two-week sprints. As Mayer points out, it’s all relative. If a team accomplished nothing in a given sprint, then realizing a 300 percent improvement would be a snap. But it hardly means the team’s hyper-productive.

I suppose my take is that yes, the notion of “hyper-productivity” is somewhat beside the point, but measuring rates of improvement over time is absolutely essential to push a team to grow and increase its capacity. However, it’s essential for the team, not to be compared to some gold standard of hyper-productivity.

One reason cited for the relative uselessness of such a metric is that, in Scrum and other agile environments, work is estimated in terms of story points—an abstracted unit of difficulty that is agreed upon by the team. Because these units possess no direct correspondence to the amount of time required to complete work, they remain, at best, estimations. However, team members who work together over time typically develop a common of understanding of their estimating system and do, in fact, begin to assess work in a consistent manner. Thus a team’s rate of improvement is reliably measurable—just not in the sense that Sutherland suggests. While identifying an absolute measure of hyper-productivity misses the point, having a trend line to refer to as an indication of improvement over time is still valuable for teams.

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Agile Dogma

July 1, 2009

One of the biggest criticisms against Scrum and agile evangelists is that their all-or-nothing attitude undermines the very improvements Scrum and agile promise. Of course, those of us who do practice by-the-book Scrum and agile understand why it’s so important to hold fast to those principles and processes: because they’re the key to unlocking increased productivity, accelerated cycle time, and reduced overall costs. But in his article “Agile Development: Dogma Vs. Degree,” which recently appeared in the online edition of SD Times, David Rubinstein makes an important distinction that often gets lost in the midst of so much evangelist noise. He writes:

“On one side of the argument are those who believe that adopting any of the steps is a move toward agility; that the important thing is not adherence to the steps but instead an improvement in the organization’s software development.”

What I think is important in this quote is Rubinstein’s articulation that the end goal of adopting agile or Scrum is measurable improvement within the organization, not perfectly complying with every aspect of the methodology’s processes. Again, the “rules” of Scrum and agile are there for a reason: They give teams guiderails to lean on during the difficult process of wide-spread organizational change. But an organization does not win if it adopts every aspect of an agile method. They win when they realize change within the organization and begin to work in ways that lets them do things they never could before.

One note: I found it interesting that Rubinstein decided to interview a representative from every major agile tool vendor except the one that we use! In case you’ve missed it in previous posts, we use Danube’s ScrumWorks Pro to manage our projects and it’s really great—mostly for being so easy to use and aligned with the Scrum framework. If you’re using Scrum and find yourself in the market for a tool, you should definitely look into this one.

Written by admin · Filed Under Agile Project Management, Scrum | Leave a Comment 

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