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Yuval Yeret

James Shore: Value Velocity: A Better Productivity Metric? - 0 views

jamesshore.com/...etter-Productivity-Metric.html

agile roi productivity

shared by Yuval Yeret on 24 Jun 09 - Cached
  • *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.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • It's like traditional velocity, except it's based on your customers' estimates of value rather than your programmers' estimates of cost.
  • stories don't always have value on their own.
  • Although value velocity isn't perfect, a team with consistent value estimates would be able to graph their value velocity over time and see how their productivity changes. This would allow them to experiment with new techniques ("Let's switch pairs every 90 minutes! Now once a week!") and see how they affect productivity. If balanced with actual measures of value and some sort of defect counting, this could be a powerful tool.
  • just estimate and score features rather than stories.
  • Another option would be to pro-rate each feature's estimate across all of the stories required to deliver it.
  • some types of stories don't provide value in the traditional way. What's the value of fixing a nasty crash bug?
  • Third, value velocity is just as vulnerable to gaming as cost velocity is... perhaps more so. I'm not sure how to prevent this.
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