Why Agile Velocity is the most dangerous metric for software dev teams

linearb.io

5 points·davetwichell··5 comments

"Story Points are a subjective measure decided and agreed upon by an individual software development team or organization."

ha ha. garbage in, garbage out:

The first question I ask a new team: what is the unit of measure for a story point? The first answer is usually "it does not matter".

Then, after much explaining, they would give something like one man-hour, or half a day for one developer, or some such. Amazingly, even within the single team, there often no agreement on how the story points are measured.

And if you don't use objective units of measure, then the metric is useless.

Very true! The article doesn't mention that individual teams can't agree but that's another reason velocity is sketchy.

Java-man, I take it you don't track velocity? What metrics do you like to track?

something similar to [0]. a little example of breaking work into small pieces (without schedule estimates) is here [1].

0. https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2007/10/26/evidence-based-sch...

1. https://github.com/andy-goryachev/PasswordSafe/blob/master/F...

Are VPs really sharing velocity with the CEO? I've never seen that. But I agree it doesn't make sense to try to use story points completed to do comparative performance measurement.

“Never use velocity to measure performance and never share velocity outside of individual teams.” I wonder how many teams stick to this

Reply on news.ycombinator.com