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.

Written by admin · Filed Under Scrum 

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