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What is Sprint Velocity – and How Can it Accelerate Your Enterprise?
What is Sprint Velocity?
Velocity is calculated at the end of the sprint by adding up the points for all completed User Stories or customer requirements.
With this prior knowledge, your business can plan future projects knowing how much work can be completed in the next sprint. This will help you to accurately allocate time and resources to complete the project.
Furthermore, Sprint Velocity estimates give customers and stakeholders a better idea of when they can expect the delivery of products and services.
This guide will cover the best ways to improve Sprint Velocity. The common denominator is that to move faster, you must make the effort now and “plant the seeds” to enable higher productivity in future sprints.
How Do You Estimate Sprint Velocity?
To estimate what quantity of work can be completed in a set time frame, first you must measure the work that has been done previously. To get a good average measurement of previous work, you should review the previous three sprints.
Here’s how:
- Count the number of user story points completed in each sprint. At the end of a sprint, add up how many stories points the team completed.
- For example, assume that in Sprint 1, the team had set out to complete 5 user stories with 10 points each, totalling 50 story points – but had completed just three.
- In Sprint 2, the team committed to 7 user stories (including the 2 that were not completed in Sprint 1).
- Each user story had 10 points for a total of 70 story points. The team completed 4 of the 7 user stories.
- In Sprint 3, the team committed to nine user stories, each with 10 story points for a total of 90 story points and completed 5. Now calculate the average of completed story points.
- 3 x 10 = 30
4 x 10 = 40
5 x 10 = 50
Average Sprint Velocity: 120 / 3 = 40 - You can now base the amount of work to be done in future sprints on the average of 40 points.
- If you have 120 points yet to be completed, you can reasonably estimate that your team will need three sprints to finish the project.
How do you accelerate the product-to-market Process?
While automation and maintenance are essential, they can slow down a team’s velocity. But you can save time by discarding non-essential tests on features that are either unused or already covered by other testing mechanisms.
Increasing quality means more investment in code reviews and testing. But it’s a worthwhile investment. Putting the extra effort into creating sustainable software minimises problems and helps production to move at greater velocity.
Hire internal or external third-party consultants to assist you with infrastructure set up. Use training initiatives to help team members upskill and supplement the team with new members who already have those skills.
Advance planning can boost efficiency dramatically. It is a great opportunity to bring your team together to establish what everyone is responsible for over the next sprint. For your sprint planning meeting, write up task breakdowns for the next one to three sprints, and only “stubs” for user stories in the next four to five sprints. This added transparency helps to identify challenges, and dependencies, and to consider approaches and technical solutions, keeping you ahead of the game.
The sprint retrospective is essential for helping teams develop and enhance their processes. The key to success in any enterprise is communication, and that requires people to sit down with each other from time to time to address and resolve practical and technical problems.
How Do You Stabilise and Improve Sprint Velocity?
Stabilisation Sprints are added to the end of your team’s normal development cycle before the product or service is shipped.
These are used to perform testing, resolve technical backlogs, clean up code, fix bugs, and much more.
You will not ordinarily need to track velocity in stabilisation sprints because you are not adding any new story points.
A ResearchGate study found that velocity always fluctuated in the first few iterations from sprint to sprint. The report also discovered that velocity is most likely to stabiles after completing at least three iterations.
Things to Consider for Stabilisation & Improvement:
- Keep your user stories clear and simple
- While dispensing with unnecessary testing is important, it is equally important to implement rigorous testing where it is needed.
- Use sprint retrospectives to revise how to stabilize velocity. Focus on communication and team coordination.
- Eliminate time-consuming dependencies.
- Put Quality above Quantity.
- Keep team membership and size consistent.
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What Needs to be Considered for Sprint Planning?
The cornerstone of any Agile Scrum framework is transparency. This applies to team members and technology alike. For communication and efficiency, all team members must be involved in the development of the sprint backlog.
What are the Main Benefits of Sprint Velocity?
There are many different methods agile organisations can implement to increase their Sprint Velocity.
Done correctly, the combination of Sprint Velocity and high-quality software technology has the potential to help your organisation double its efficiency and productivity.
It will also help you avoid overpromising your clients and stakeholders on product and service delivery.
The ability to move quickly is paramount but going that extra mile to plant the seeds of efficiency is key to ensuring productivity and sustainability in the long term.