Agile Velocity - Stop Obsessing about it!
Today I'm going show you why obsessing about story point velocity is actually hurting you...
So here is trap I see lots of team and scrum master new to agile fall into: obsessing about velocity, where velocity is often used as a way to quantity how much work as been done (usually in the form of story points) in a sprint.
And I see lots of questions like: how do I increase my team's velocity? Can I do about my velocity being too low? etc. These sort of questions really trouble me, because it shows a lack of understanding of what velocity is for.
The first thing to clarify is that velocity is simply an observation, nothing else. The problem is that it too often becomes a target. How can an observation be a target? Ok, just to give the devil its due, I get it, we might wish you were going faster, you wish you could deliver more stuff every sprint and delight your users, I get it...
But the big problem here is the feature factory mindset... a term that John Cutler coined a few years ago about this mode of working where the goal is to produce features after features, like in factory, without any focus on whether value has been delivered. High velocity could just mean you're delivering more rubbish faster.
I recently saw a talk from Kevlin Henney where he made the distinction between velocity and speed. If you remember your lessons in physics from school, you'll know that velocity is in fact a vector... velocity = speed + direction. When we measure the number of story points delivered in a sprint, we are in fact talking about speed. Are we going in the right direction? Are we building the right features? This sense of direction is often completely missing...
This is something most teams can definitely improve on... I've got a few tips on how to do in another video: • These 5 tips will make your Agile sprint r...
Another thing that Kevlin shared in his talk is about the PDCA cycle. It's basically a popular model for continiuous improvement
which goes like this: Plan - Do - Check - Act
Although there is an early version of this where the word "study" was used instead of the word "check". Kevlin made the point that he prefers this older version. Because the word "check" implies something quick, something you do just to confirm that everything is fine... whereas the word "study" implies something slow, something that takes time and effort.
Imagine, you've just finished a sprint, and the obsession of velocity (or speed I should say), makes you want to go fast... Quick, let's a short sprint review and make sure the PO is happy, before we start the new sprint right away. There is no time for analysis, there is no time for thinking.
Consider this, with waterfall, we went from Plan, Plan, Plan, Plan, then Do, do, do, do. And now the way most people do agile is: plan, do, plan, plan, do, plan, do.
This obsession about velocity is not healthy, slow down, and I promise you, you'll go faster in the end by focusing on building the right thing.
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