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3 Metrics for Engineering Team Success Other Than Velocity

Looking past Velocity

Amanda Quint
Better Programming

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Photo by Jo Szczepanska on Unsplash

Update: I gave a talk on this topic for PyOhio2022. The video is available here.

If you have worked in an Agile software development environment, you are probably familiar with the idea of measuring a team’s Velocity.

Velocity is a metric that can be measured in story points or hours, and it can help answer if the team is working at a steady rate, as well as give an idea about how much work the team can deliver over an iteration.

For example, if a team has maintained an average velocity of 25 points per sprint for the past few sprints, you can generally assume that they will keep a similar velocity, as long as nothing drastically changes (new project or tools, changing team members, etc.). While other factors may come into play, this means that it will take them roughly 4 sprints to finish a project that has been estimated to contain 100 points worth of user stories.

Velocity is an important metric to a lot of software teams, but in my experience, it’s often been the most important metric to management — often at the expense of missing out on the rest of the story.

Here are some other software metrics to consider when looking at your team’s data.

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