Danilo Sato

Continuing with the series on how to misuse velocity, the second anti-pattern I would like to highlight is when teams start making up points. Because the definition of velocity is so simple, it’s easy to game the metric to show what looks like apparent progress. If a team is being measured on velocity (more about this on later posts), it’s quite easy to just start increasing estimates: “If we just double all estimates, the relative sizes stay the same, but our velocity doubles!“. This is an extreme behaviour that would be quickly noticed as a discrepancy, but the same thing could happen in a smaller scale and pass unnoticed.

This problem can not only be originated from the team, but I’ve also seen Project Managers/Scrum Masters coming up with “clever” ways of making up points to count as velocity:

• Counting percentage or half points (as mentioned in my previous post)
• Deciding to split a story to count the partially finished work as complete, and track whatever is left in a separate story (splitting should be business-driven and not tracking-driven: it should only happen when you come up with simpler/incremental ways of delivering value in smaller chunks)
• Counting points on technical tasks. I’ve seen a team that spent a lot of effort in an iteration to make up for accumulated technical debt, and did not have a lot of time to work on new stories. The Project Manager decided to come up with a “refactoring card” and gave it a 16 to try and demonstrate how much effort was spent on such refactoring
• Counting points for in-release bug fixing. In a team, stories were deemed completed on the first iteration, but bugs started to show up in later iterations, impacting he team’s ability to deliver new functionality. Instead of allowing the decrease in velocity to demonstrate how the lack of focus on quality was impacting the team (bugs should be prevented in the first place, right?), the Project Manager decided to estimate and count points on bugs, which kept velocity apparently constant, when in fact a lot less value was being delivered

The next time you catch yourself asking “Should X count as velocity?”, stop, reflect, and ask instead “Should I worry about X happening at all?”. If you are worried about having to track or show progress on things that should be embedded parts of the process (such as activities to prevent bugs or refactoring), chances are that the problem lies somewhere else. Some of these questions might make as much sense as “Should time spent on retrospectives count as velocity?” or “Should going to the bathroom count as velocity?” :-)

I’m sure that these examples drawn from my personal experience are just a few examples of how to make up points and misuse velocity. What other similar experiences did you have in your own projects?

Dan North wrote an interesting post about the perils of estimation, questioning our approach to inceptions, release planning, and setting expectations about scope. This made me think about the implications of those factors once a project starts, and I came up with some anti-patterns on the usage of velocity to track progress. This is my first attempt at writing about them.

Before we start, it’s important to understand what velocity means. My simple definition of velocity is the total number of estimation units for the items delivered in an iteration. Estimation unit can be whatever the team chooses: ideal days, hours, pomodoros, or story points. The nature of items may vary as well: features, use cases, and user stories are common choices. Iteration is a fixed amount of time where the team will work on delivering those items. Sounds simple? Well… there’s one concept that is commonly overlooked and that’s the source of the first anti-pattern: what does delivered means?

One of the most common anti-patterns I’ve seen is not having a clear definition of done. Lean thinking tells us that nothing is really done until it’s delivering value, which in software means: code running in production and being used by real users. Although I know very few teams who can deploy code to production at the end of every iteration (some even do more than once per iteration), once a story is considered done, it could be potentially shipped, if the business decides so. There shouldn’t be a lot of extra work after that.

Another bad implication of this anti-pattern is that some teams decide to change the definition of done and count half-completed work to show progress. Some of the symptoms to help diagnose if your team is suffering from this anti-pattern are:

• The team starts tracking dev-complete stories
• “It’s done, but [we need to write the acceptance test/it’s not integrated with the other system/…]”
• “It’s done, but not done-done”
  
• It takes a lot of extra work to get the story deployed to production
• After finished, the story goes into the next team’s backlog
• Hearing terms like “development team velocity” or “test team velocity”
• Counting half-points or percentages because “if we don’t count it will look like we haven’t worked”

The solution? Remember that velocity is just a number that provides information for the team to understand and improve it’s process. Forget that you’re tracking it and focus on the entire Value Stream and on what’s really value-added to get things into production. Anything else is just waste. If it’s not done, it’s not done. Accept it, move on, and don’t overcomplicate, because it will only add noise and mask what could have been important information to the team.