Velocity != Productivity
I really don’t know why I always have to repeat this time and time again, over and over. It feels like every time I turn around there’s always someone who thinks/acts like velocity is a productivity metric. Enough Already! It’s not!
All that it really is is a number that identifies the capacity a team can take on in the next iteration based on the previous iterations. Basically, it’s an indicator of what a team has the capacity to do, not it’s productivity. To quote Paul Hodgetts:
“Velocity is more of a quantity of work completed metric. Useful and important, but not the sole measure of success. I think you would want a set of metrics that together help us understand our current capabilities to deliver as well as if those capabilities are changing from one point in time to another. I don’t believe there is one magic “agility number” to measure [productivity].”
Just wish there was someway to stop people from thinking the sky is falling and productivity is going down because of a decrease in velocity. 
If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
June 22nd, 2009 at 10:24 am
amen!
June 22nd, 2009 at 11:39 am
Quantity of work divided by an amount of time sure does sound like a way to express productivity. It just inaccurate, somewhat like forecasting the weather. It’s still better then nothing.
July 2nd, 2009 at 9:39 am
here’s a nice article on agile buddy about it also:
http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=47120249&gid=52030&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fblog%2Eagilebuddy%2Ecom%2F2009%2F06%2Fmeasuring-velocity-is-not-enough-to-determine-team-productivity%2Ehtml&urlhash=_qPs&trk=news_discuss