Thread by @nikilyushkin

Day 5: Wanna kill the agility of your team? Become obsessed with Velocity metric.

Incredibly Nerdy Post Alert 🚨🚨

Have you ever been in a situation where a Leadership Team or Product Managers are obsessed with Velocity?

This thread will help you to move your organisation away from this rabbit hole.

According to Scrum.org, Velocity indicates the average amount of Product Backlog items turned into a ready product increment during a Sprint by a Scrum Team.

Velocity does not show:

• Has the team resolved any customer pain points?
• Has the team addressed the customer's top priority issue?
• What value has been delivered, or were metrics improved?
• Neither does it tell us are our customers happier.

Velocity only shows that the team was busy with something.

Is this a realistic measure of your business success? Do your customers love your product because of your developers' utilisation? It would be so much easier if they were, but 😂

Let’s follow the system diagram to see the connection between Velocity, DoD strength and Agility.

The stronger the DoD, the less undone work in each sprint. Undone work limits the team in the number of releases and thus the amount of feedback received from the customers.

More feedback, the more decisions the Product Manager can make to update or re-prioritise the Backlog.

A quick, prompt change in product development direction increases Agility.

The feedback and tangible outcomes may push the Team to strengthen their DoD even more. The loop is closed.

#1 Focus on Velocity weakens your Definition of Done

Stronger DoD pushes teams to perform more work each iteration.
So Velocity will decrease.

Guess what Development Teams will choose to do with DoD, keeping in mind that teams' effectiveness is measured by Velocity?

#2 Focus on Velocity kills Transparency

People will start deflating the sizes of Product Backlog Items to artificially bloat their velocity, to keep themselves out of middle/upper management sight.

What should you focus on instead?

Metrics which
• show actual value delivered to the market (e.g. product metrics),
• measure flow (e.g., time to market, cycle time),
• the teams’ ability to provide long-term value.

Is Velocity pure evil?

No, Velocity is still a valuable measure for the team. Because it is based on actual Done work, it can be used to forecast a delivery window or improve a team’s estimation skills.

To sum up:

• Velocity does not show whether customer problems are being solved or whether the value is being delivered. It only measures output.

• Velocity indicates that the team was busy with something.

• By the way, the velocity of component teams is always zero.

• Focusing on Velocity kills agility. Focus on the value delivered to the market instead.

• If your team cannot ship every Sprint - forget about Velocity and focus on DoD.

#Ship30for30