Agile 101: Points, Velocity, Rhythm

Tom Mochal, PgMP, PMP, TSPM is the president of TenStep, Inc., a methodology development, consulting and training company. Tom won the Distinguished Contribution Award from the Project Management Institute for his work spreading knowledge of project management around the world. He is a speaker, lecturer, instructor and consultant to companies and organizations around the world.

  Agile   Estimating   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

On many projects, work is planned months in advance and you might delay a milestone or implementation if it is not completed. In an Agile project, you plan for the current iteration and adjust workload, if necessary, for the next. Here is a primer on the fundamental Agile concepts of story points, velocity and team rhythm.

One of the unique aspects of an Agile project is that the workload for each iteration is determined at the beginning of each iteration. In other words, the workload is not laid out months and months in advance. There is only a need to plan for the current iteration. This allows the Agile project to be very flexible.

At the beginning of every iteration a meeting is held between the client product owner and the project team to determine the workload for the new iteration. During the meeting the product owner evaluates the requirements backlog and pulls off the next set of use cases (or user stories) that are of the highest priority. The level of effort for each use case should have been assigned when it was added to the backlog. There should either be an actual estimate of effort hours, or more likely a number of “story points.”

Story points are arbitrary numbers used to estimate the relative size of a use case. The exact scale is different from team to team. For example, if one use case has 10 story points, another use case that is …

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