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*Please note that I'm specifically talking about productivity. Velocity is a great tool for estimating and planning and I'm not trying to change that. It's just not a good measure of productivity.

rather than asking your business experts to measure business value after delivery (difficult!), have them estimate it beforehand. Every story (or feature--keep reading) gets an estimate before it's scheduled. At the end of each iteration, add up the value estimates for the stories you completed in that iteration. This is your "value velocity."

And rather than reflecting the hours programmers work, as cost velocity does, value velocity actually reflects productivity. Remember, productivity equals output/time. Value estimates are a much better indication of output than cost estimates are.

It’s a lot easier to estimate a story that’s small — which can lead to more accurate estimates, and better predictability.

It’s easier to plan with smaller stories. With big stories — stories that might take weeks for a developer to implement — it becomes difficult to plan a development time-box — particularly when the iterations are only a couple of weeks. It seems that only a couple stories fit — and there’s often room for half a story — but how do you build half a story? Splitting them into smaller stories makes it easier to plan those time-boxes.

Shrinking stories forces earlier elaboration and decision-making. Where product owners could write their stories fairly generally and consider many of the details later, now breaking them down into smaller stories forces more thinking earlier in a planning lifecycle.

Lesson #1:  Task-based plans don't convey business value.  Feature-based plans do.

Once an estimate proves incorrect, any other estimate based on that one is now incorrect.

Lesson 2:  Estimate in size, not duration

Second getting them to understand Story Points, a seemingly meaningless measurement, seemed to be a non-starter for them.

deal hours first This is where ideal hours came to the rescue. They were far more able to wrap their heads around ideal hours i.e. if you lock the developers and testers in a room with zero interruptions, how long would it take. I figured that once they got their initial stories estimated in ideal hours down, switching to Story points will be easy as they would have established a scale of reference to compare against. This approach worked really well. They're now into their 3rd Sprint and now that they have an existing scale, whether the number is in ideal hours or story points or dog points for that matter, it really doesn't matter any more. If you're new to agile estimating, and you're having trouble coming to terms with Story Points try this first and then make the switch later.

development

Venture-capital financing model This can be used with any of the above contract forms. In this model, the sponsor gives a round of financing for a certain amount of work, and the contracted company must produce results in order to get more funding. The sponsor can cut their losses at any time if they are not getting the results they need. They can presumably alter the terms of the contract after each work period. The result of a work period need not be working software; it could be a paper study, or a requirements document, or anything the sponsor selects. The venture-capital finance model works well with agile providers, since the agile provider is used to delivering useful, working software early and regularly. I find it an odd irony that the venture capital financiers running start-ups that I have encountered don’t take advantage of their own model to the extent agile teams do. The venture financiers let the evaluation markers occur too far apart in time. If they attached funding to monthly releases, that would oblige the start-up team to think through what it really can accomplish each month. The monthly progress would give the financiers a better sense of the start-up company’s real progress.

Venture-capital financing model This can be used with any of the above contract forms. In this model, the sponsor gives a round of financing for a certain amount of work, and the contracted company must produce results in order to get more funding. The sponsor can cut their losses at any time if they are not getting the results they need. They can presumably alter the terms of the contract after each work period. The result of a work period need not be working software; it could be a paper study, or a requirements document, or anything the sponsor selects. The venture-capital finance model works well with agile providers, since the agile provider is used to delivering useful, working software early and regularly. I find it an odd irony that the venture capital financiers running start-ups that I have encountered don’t take advantage of their own model to the extent agile teams do. The venture financiers let the evaluation markers occur too far apart in time. If they attached funding to monthly releases, that would oblige the start-up team to think through what it really can accomplish each month. The monthly progress would give the financiers a better sense of the start-up company’s real progress.

Bob Martin’s idea Bob Martin of Object Mentor posted an interesting variant to get around this problem: a base fee per story point, plus a lower-than-usual (close-to or below cost) fee per hour. This biases the contracted company’s to deliver early, but gives them some protection in case work proceeds slower than expected. Bob Martin described it this way:”[A]gree to pay a certain amount for each point completed, plus a certain amount for each hour worked. For example, let’s say you’ve got a project of 1000 points. Let’s also say that a team of four has established an estimated velocity of 50 points per week. This looks like about an 80 man-week job. At $100/hour this would be a $320,000 job. So lets reduce the hourly rate to $30/hour, and ask the customer for $224 per point. This sets up a very interesting dynamic. If the job really does take 80 man-weeks, then it will cost the same. If it takes 100 man-weeks then it will cost $344,000. If it takes 70 man-weeks it will cost $308,000. Notice that this is a small difference for a significant amount of time. Notice also that you, as developer feel strong motivation to be done early, since that increases your true hourly rate.” I have not seen that model in action myself, but several people have written in recommending it.

One of the developers had checked in some code that failed the regression tests. The application, on which the company had spent considerable time, money and effort, was now in an uncertain state. It wasn't behaving as expected. In the past, this type of bug usually wasn't discovered for months. Usually, it wasn't discovered until the System Integration Testing cycle got underway. For this project, that wasn't scheduled for another 6 months.

In the past, this bug would have lingered in the code for 6 months before anyone even realized it was a problem

. The light had gone off only 6 minutes after the code had been committed. Notice: not 6 months...but 6 minutes!

Doubling velocity (story points done-done in each sprint) usually means we must improve several things:

a clearer definition of done

no [known] bugs escape the Sprint

When doing Kanban, you still need to do the equivalent of planning, assignment, estimation, retrospectives, delivery, etc. In Kanban, all of these activities are decoupled from each other whereas in Scrum they are all coupled to the iteration boundary. How can this be applied to Scrum? Consider retrospectives. If you are just starting with Scrum, you probably have an iteration length of 1 month (or four weeks). From that it follows that you will have a retrospective once per month. If you eventually end up with an iteration length of 1 week, then it follows that you will have a retrospective every week. But this actually seems like the wrong way to set the cadence of retrospectives. Wouldn’t it be better to have the cadence of retrospectives meet the need for them? If it eventually makes sense to do a retrospective every week, doesn’t it make sense to get the benefit of them on a weekly basis when you are just starting Scrum?

The Roadmap consists of a series of planned release dates, each of which has a theme and a prioritized feature set.

While it is a simple thing mechanically to represent the Roadmap, figuring out the content for anything beyond the next release is another matter entirely. The topic of what else the team plans to ship and when can be a fascinating and contentious topic in agile

the easiest way to think about the Roadmap is that it is an output, rather than an input to the Release Planning process.