Following the famous mantra of “you can’t manage what you can’t measure”, Scrum teams have often a set of metrics to monitor their activity. Velocity, the amount of work performed by a team during a single sprint, might be one of the most famous Agile metric. Doc Norton has written an interesting book about the negative sides of velocity and what might be a good metric for an Agile team. Based on his experience, Doc Norton starts his book with a long discussion of the flaws of the velocity metric. From this base, he explains then the issues with metrics in general and proposes alternative measures (lead time, team joy, etc.) to monitor the evolution of Agile teams. My favorite part is the section that tries to examine the problem from a customer perspective. This book is easy to read, mixing concepts with stories from the trenches. I will recommend this book naturally to every member of a Scrum team, but it should provide interesting ideas to every software development project manager or executive. Reference: Escape Velocity – Better Metrics for Agile Teams, Doc Norton, https://leanpub.com/escapevelocity Quotes Velocity is a poor metric that offers far less value than the angst that results from the perpetual misuse. In agile software development, velocity is the rate at which a team delivers value to the customer. Value is quantifiable, and we can therefore say it has size. The direction is indicated by the traversal from idea to implementation. A team that completes lots [...]
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