Spin-Free Velocity

  Agile   Estimating   Scrum   Stakeholder Management   ProjectsAtWork  

Velocity measures an agile team’s ability to execute, but it often gets misinterpreted or manipulated, which leads to hopeful hunches or downright bad decisions. Because a team's most recent sprint is most indicative of future performance, there's a way to calculate velocity that generates estimates you can use with confidence.

In autumn, business dialog in the United States is filled with football metaphors. Don’t be a Monday-morning quarterback … It’s a game of inches … When in doubt, punt … You’re only as good as your last game ... and several attributed to Vince Lombardi, including, “We didn't lose the game; we just ran out of time.”

While musing over the applicability of these, and others, to agile teams, I kept coming back to this one: "You're only as good as your last game." 

In football, every team has a bad game every once in a while. The team plays flat or fails to execute crisply. That one bad game shouldn't discount all that the team has accomplished up to that point. At the same time, though, a team’s most recent performance is probably a better sign of how they will play next week than, say, a game played in week one, when the team was still learning to work together.

The same holds true for an agile team. Though each team will have a bad sprint from time to time, …

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