Velocity is Just Capacity 20
I don’t know why, but somehow velocity as a term really bothers me.
We always want higher velocity, and that’s a good thing. But with the term velocity, we think that we can create velocity with greater pressure (thrust?). Doesn’t it make sense that with a really hard push you can get greater velocity?
I guess I get hung up on words. Essentially, “velocity” is fine. It is the rate at which we’re “burning through” our stories. We use “yesterday’s weather” to set our level, and we are always seeking any sustainable way to increase our velocity. Why would we produce only 12 points when we could produce 20? As motivated developers, we aren’t yearning to accomplish less. But somehow this doesn’t tell the right story.
When our velocity is decreased, it always seems like a tragedy. We have all felt it when our 23-point iteration is followed by a 21-point iteration. We can justify it a lot of different ways, but it always feels tragic. Worse, hitting any kind of plateau seems frustrating.
You increase velocity by pushing harder. If you push harder, and the numbers come up, then you’ve successfully increased the velocity and that seems to be intuitively all there is to it.
I’ve reflected about this for a few years before I realized that I really like the term capacity much more. It is also accurately describing the rate at which we can truly complete stories. Since we use yesterday’s weather, we can even use the term “proven capacity” to describe that we’ve demonstrated the speed. But it also says some other things.
Intuitively it seems that we know that you don’t push your people beyond their capacity to get work done. Instead, you want to increase their capacity. When we talk about longer hours, it is still obvious that working people harder diminishes their capacity. Instead, we want to be working at capacity on the one hand, and increasing our capacity on the other.
Increasing the capacity sounds like the right problem. To improve capacity, you want fresh workers working hard, pairing and communicating, building and/or using better tools (or using tools more capably), using more powerful hardware, learning, and performing the kind of housekeeping that keeps the team productive. Life balance enters into it. Sufficient team size enters into it so you’re not so small you’re short-handed, yet not so plentiful you trip over each other.
I don’t suppose that anyone is going to rename standardized eXtreme Programming terms like “velocity” just because some guy from Indiana says to, but I wonder if maybe we can’t rephrase the problem in such a way that we are intuitively driven toward more reasonable solutions. Maybe we should explain that velocity is just capacity, and then work from that point onward.
Sometimes, I think semantics like this isn’t really worth it (like the ‘pliant’ folk) – but I very much agree with capacity instead of velocity.
Scrum has multiple terms that seem to be out of touch with the mantra of sustainable pace. Velocity is indeed one of them, but how about Sprint? I’m pretty sure I preferred it when we just called them Iterations.
I may be missing the point here, but now that I think of “velocity” as “capacity” it seems to me that it is very much like “productivity”. I don’t mean to nitpick, it’s just that productivity is quite widely used.
But I’m new to Scrum and Agile, so please be gentle :)
I guess I think of velocity a little different. I consider it more of an indicator. Consider it synonymous with a physician taking the body temperature of a patient. If the Dr. sees that it is higher or lower than expected she will dig a little deeper to see what the issue might be.
But that doesn’t mean it always indicates something bad. Maybe velocity has decreased because the office is running a March Madness pool so they are little distracted. Or maybe it does indicate a problem – a new tool was introduced that was supposed to increase capacity (or productivity).
Velocity should be an indicator, but too many people think it is a knob or lever instead.
And it is like body temperature, in that not all decreases are losses and not all increases are wins. It is obvious also that it is prone to estimation error, so we shouldn’t panic at normal variations (+/- some amount).
We should use velocity for planning, and we should monitor it, but we only increase velocity by improving something else in the system, not by demanding a higher velocity.
IMHO, capacity means a given volume at a particular time.
Velocity on the other hand, relates more to a given volume over time.
Like Tim said, velocity is more like an indicator rather than a target. Then again, having such information at the hand of management, it would be really tempting not to utilize it as they see fit. Mandating velocity, IMO, is an easy temptation for management to fall into.
I may be missing the point here, but now that I think of “velocity” as “capacity” it seems to me that it is very much like “productivity”. I don’t mean to nitpick, it’s just that productivity is quite widely used.
I think you are missing the point. Productivity is how much you produced, but capability is how much you are capable of producing. One will push velocity and productivity in ineffective ways (coercion, reward, punishment, browbeating, cheerleading) but capacity must be increased in different ways (more effective techniques, removing waste, increasing team). Consider “we aren’t as productive as we should be” v. “we don’t have the capacity to get as much done as we would like” and see how it changes your approach.
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Ha, i like your little diatribe against the term “velocity”. When people throw around puff words, like “utilize” (just say USE!), its always a pet peeve of mine. Is the word velocity really that cool?
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Excellent post. Really clarifies the semantics of this whole thing
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