Talk:Velocity (software development)

Velocity still seems a valid Process Indicator. Provided it is related to Quality criteria, the argument of 'completing any work is also considered as "work done"' is not valid since the Quality criteria, in particular those of meeting the features to deliver and also taking into consideration the amount of bugfixes, Velocity is a valuable and informative metric. It just should not be reported as a standalone metric. 176.74.235.98 (talk) 12:50, 14 June 2018 (UTC)

This article needs citations. Trouble is, from a scientific perspective Velocity is a bogus metric. It doesn't really measure anything. It has no construct validity. It flies in the face of modern forecasting techniques. There's no evidence of effectiveness. So there's not much research on it.

Paul Ralph (University of Auckland) (talk) 18:59, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

Older edits
I have removed references to Velocity as being a tool to measure performance. This is not supported by the references and I have seen no evidence that it was the intention of Velocity as it developed from either the extreme programming or scrum world. It's also quite important to get this definition correct because people often confuse capacity planning with a performance metric.

If some people think that it is suitable as a performance metric for teams then I think we need references and could add it back in as a controversy section or similar because using it as a performance metric is quite the opposite of the intention of most mainstream agile methods like scrum and XP.


 * "some people think that it is suitable as a performance metric for teams" Clearly some people do. It's specifically warned against as a mistake in mis-using velocity, covered in most decent Scrum training. It might even be worth covering this as a notable misunderstanding. I know some teams who don't use velocity (or who keep it well hidden) because the team's management is smarter than the business' management and they know that if these magic velocity figures ever make it up to the pointy-hairs, then they'll start seeing them compared to lines-of-code metrics and used to calculate christmas bonuses. Andy Dingley (talk) 10:56, 18 September 2012 (UTC)