Velocity in Agile Projects

This article talks about calculating the team velocity of the agile project and addressing the benefit of the team velocity.

Velocity is an extremely simple, powerful method for accurately measuring the rate at which teams consistently deliver business value.

It is a measure of how much product backlog items the team can complete in the given amount of time.

It is used the compare the iterations for the given team on a given project, the note is only completed work counts for calculating the velocity.

Before you begin to calculate your team’s velocity, you will want to complete at least three to five sprints.

This allows for a team that is new to Agile project management to get used to the workflow and for any changes the team is going through to normalize.

Your velocity will fluctuate during these initial sprints but will stabilize after three or more have been completed.

Agile velocity formula:

Sprint 4:

Planned = 8 user stories * 3 story points = 24 story points

Actual = 4 user stories * 3 story points = 12 story points

Sprint 5:

Planned = 10 user stories * 5 story points = 50 story points

Actual = 7 user stories * 5 story points = 35 story points

Sprint 6:

Planned = 9 user stories * 4 story points = 36 story points

Actual = 7 user stories * 4 story points = 28 story points

Average sprint velocity = (sum of all sprint actual story points)/ number of sprints

Average sprint velocity = (12+35+28)/3 = 25

The average sprint velocity is 25, from the Sprint 7 Scrum owner can plan to complete 25 worth of user story point work.

Some of the benefits of velocities are:

Understanding about agile project performance
Reporting project progress, productivity, predictability
Finding pain points and improvement areas
Used as metrics
Calculating the rate at which the product moving forward
Provides vision what can be achieved in next release

Kindly note that keep on increasing the team velocity is not mean to maximize the productivity, when we focus more on increasing the team velocity the team may skip following standards, unit testing, bug-fixing. The goal is to maintain the optimum velocity over time, which takes account of following standards, quality and other factors.

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