Introduction
Whether you are a project manager, a scrum master, an agile coach or a stakeholder it is important to track and predict the project status for successful delivery of a project. Out of the many tools available for managing projects in Agile ways of working, we will discuss about Velocity Chart in this blog. Velocity Chart is a visual tool, which represents data in a bar graph, that helps teams in tracking their past performances and helps them to predict their future sprints. In this article, we’ll explore everything about Velocity Charts, from definition to interpretation, and how teams can leverage benefits by using it.
What is a Velocity Chart?
You must be aware that while working in Agile methodology, the amount of work is calculated in Story points. A velocity chart is a visual representation of the amount of work a team has completed in the past, typically measured in completed story points. In other words, it shows the historical data of the story points a team has completed over the past sprints, which helps in forecasting the future performance of the team. Velocity chart is used by scrum teams to understand their delivery efficiency and ensure better sprint planning.
What is a Velocity Chart in Agile?
In Agile, velocity chart is used to track and measure teams velocity over the time, where Velocity refers to the work completed by a team in a sprint – in technical worlds, its called the story points burnt in a sprint. This metric comes handy as a useful tool to plan and predict the future sprint based on the historical performance.
X-axis on the velocity chart shows the number of sprints and the Y-axis consists of story points burnt/ completed in a sprint. The bars or graph lines represent the completed story points in a particular sprint.
By analysing their velocity chart, teams are able to adjust their sprint goals by understanding their trends whether their velocity is stable or fluctuating (increasing or decreasing).
Benefits of Using Velocity Chart in Agile
Below are some of the benefits of using velocity chart in agile:
- Better Sprint Planning: By analysing the velocity charts, teams are able to set realistic sprint goals by estimating how much work they can complete based on the team’s capacity and past performance.
- Improved Forecasting: By analysing the velocity trends the product owners and stakeholders can easily predict how many sprints would a team require to complete a project.
- Enhanced Team Performance Insights: Velocity charts help in identifying trends of a team, such as increasing or decreasing velocity, which helps getting a direction for the scrum masters indicating them to identify underlying team dynamics or even their efficiency of handling blockers.
- Capacity Planning: Using velocity charts helps teams in planning the team’s capacity so that the work can be allocated efficiently, which if done properly helps both in preventing burnout and underutilization of resources.
- Informed Decision-Making: Since the planning is done based on data driven insights, it helps teams in adjusting project timelines and expectations with the stakeholders.
- Compare Planned vs Completed work: Another analysis that a velocity chart provides is comparison on how much the plan plans and how much does it deliver against their commitment.
How to Calculate Velocity in Agile
Here is a step-by-step process that can be used to calculate velocity of a team:
- Determine the Work Completed in Each Sprint: Identify the total story points completed in the last few sprints.
- Take the Average of Past Sprint Velocities: Add up the story points from past completed sprints and divide by the number of sprints to get the average velocity. This is usually done for the last three sprints but there is no hard and fast rule to stick to 3 sprints only.
- Use the Average Velocity for Forecasting: Apply this average velocity to estimate the work the team can handle in upcoming sprints.
Lets try to understand the calculation using an example. The below table indicates the number of story points burned/completed by a team in the last 4 sprints.
| Sprint | Story Points Completed |
| Sprint 1 | 13 |
| Sprint 2 | 10 |
| Sprint 3 | 14 |
| Sprint 4 | 24 |
- Average Velocity = (13 + 10 + 14 + 24) / 4 = 25 story points
- When planning for the next sprint, the teams should pick work worth 15 +/- 3 story points.
How to Read a Velocity Chart?
Here are few scenarios which you can refer to for interpreting velocity trends over multiple sprints:
- A stable velocity suggests the team is functioning as expected and have a good understanding of their work hence they are able to burn stories worth a similar amount of story points, which suggests the team is mature and predictable.
- Increasing velocity If you observe an increase in the velocity, it may indicate that the team is fairly new and/or is improving over the past few sprints or it could even be because of the more resources added to the team.
- Decreasing velocity: A velocity chart showing declining trend may possibly mean that they are facing blockers which they are unable to close/ resolve within the sprint or there could be technical debts or even sometimes indicates poor communication within the team, or last moment unprioritised work is being added to the sprint. Even poor planning can be the reason for a velocity chart showing a downward trend, where teams are not breaking down the work enough that can be completed in a sprint.
Identifying Team Performance Patterns
- If velocity remains consistent over several sprints, it can be interpretted the team is operating at a sustainable pace and has attained the right level of maturity where it understands the dynamics and work in the right manner and are good at communicating and resolving the dependencies. But that could also be a way the team is trying to do an eye wash and strategically assigning story points to the work in a way that they are able to keep the velocity consistent. So, you should be mindful about such patterns as well
- If the velocity chart shows large fluctuations, deeper analysis needs to be done to identify the reasons. Possible reasons could be scope creep, changes made in the team – addition or deletion of team members or formation of a new team altogether, or even technical debt. If the team has remained unchanged, then you can inquire about the dynamics of team members like – low morale, burnout, or lack of motivation. There could also be conflicts in the team which may also impact their performance
- Other factors which could lead to fluctuations could be over commitment, inaccurate estimation and even complexity of tasks.
Recognizing Fluctuations and Their Impact on Planning
- Sudden drops in velocity might indicate impediments such as technical issues or team members going on leaves, improper planning and breaking of work, or backlog not maintained in prioritised manner, or even because of interference of external interference like stakeholders, which could impact the focus of team etc.
- Unexpected spikes in velocity could be because of the temporary overperformance which might come from previous sprints spilled over tasks, or temporary motivation of the employees which cannot be sustained.
Scrum Velocity Chart & Its Role in Sprint Planning
The most important use of velocity charts is to stay predictable and set realistic sprint goals. It also helps the teams in backlog refinement, ensuring the right amount of work is pulled into each sprint.
By analyzing the velocity chart and calculating the average velocity, teams can estimate the number of sprints it would require to complete the project and if the project is ongoing, it can help identify the number of sprints required to complete the remaining backlog items. It also comes handy if there is any change request and the team needs to analyse the time required to implement it.
If a team’s composition remains unchanged and the team members remain stable for a long time, its velocity remains more reliable. Frequent changes in team can lead to fluctuation in velocity, resulting in inaccurate forecasting.
Velocity Chart vs. Burndown Chart in Agile
Though both Velocity and burndown chart in agile are visual representations of the work completed by a team, there is difference between them.
Velocity charts are plotted after the sprint is completed while burndown charts are plotted from day one of the sprint.
Velocity chart measures the work completed by a team in a sprint whereas burndown chart tracks the remaining work over a sprint and is referred to every day to check how much work is remaining.
The X and Y axis of velocity chart plots sprint number and story points completed respectively while for burndown chart, it showcases time (days) and story points remaining respectively.
Velocity chart is used for forecasting and long term planning while burndown chart is used during daily standup meetings to identify team progress and understand how much work is remaining.
Conclusion
Using Velocity Chart helps in measuring team performance, plan the work effectively and efficiently and set realistic and achievable sprint goals. If teams consistently track their velocity, they can improve their predictability about the delivery of work. However, while analysing the velocity chart, one should always remember that velocity is a team metric, and should not be used to measure individual performance. If understood well, it can be used as a guide to identify a lot of patterns indicating what the team could be doing wrong or could be going through or facing. If used wisely, it can give a lot of insights to help increase productivity and streamline the process the team is following already. Also, the velocity of a team should not be compared to the velocity of another team as the way of estimation and level of maturity varies from team to team. Partner with enterprise agile transformation services companies can optimize their Agile process and improve their team’s efficiency continously.
With this, our blog on “Velocity Chart in Agile” comes to an end. We sincerely hope this has helped our readers get some clarity around it. We would be glad to discuss your unique agility adoption bottlenecks at Benzne Agile Transformation consulting and support your agile journey. Please write to us at “consult@benzne.com” for any further feedback or recommendations or in case you are looking for external coaching support.
FAQs about Velocity Chart in Agile
1. How often should a velocity chart be updated in Agile?
Velocity chart in agile should be updated after completion of every sprint to include and reflect the performance of the most recent sprint.
2. Can velocity charts be used for individual performance measurement?
No, velocity charts are a team metric and should not be used to evaluate individual performance.
3. Does a higher velocity always mean better team performance?
Not necessarily! Velocity charts of two teams cannot be compared with each other. If team A has velocity of 10 and team B has 15, it does not mean team B is more productive, their way of estimation itself may be different. A sudden increase in velocity could mean overcommitment, increase in team members or changes in estimation techniques. Similarly a sudden decrease in velocity could be an outcome of team members taking unplanned leaves or bad planning which may be due to not breaking the story properly, and it getting spilled over to the next one. Leverage expert help external consulting agile companies if you struggle with understanding and implementing techniques like story splitting.
4. Is velocity the same as productivity in Agile?
No, velocity measures the work completed in a sprint, but productivity consists of efficiency, quality and value delivered to the customer.
