What is velocity in agile?

Velocity is the amount of work a team completes in one iteration, measured in story points. If a team finishes stories worth 5, 3, 2, and 2 points in a two-week iteration, its velocity for that iteration is 12.

Velocity is an observation, not a target. Its job is to make the next plan realistic.

How velocity is calculated

1. Pick what counts as done — for example, accepted by the product owner. Only stories that reach that state count; partly finished work counts for nothing.
2. Add up the points of the done stories in each iteration.
3. Average the last few iterations. A rolling average of three to five iterations smooths out holidays, sick days, and one-off surprises.

XP calls this “yesterday’s weather”: the best guess for how much you will do next iteration is how much you did in the last few.

What velocity is used for

• Sizing the next iteration. The team plans about as many points as its velocity, so the plan matches what it actually delivers.
• Forecasting. Divide the points left in a release by the velocity to get the number of iterations remaining. A date becomes a calculation, and the conversation becomes a scope-versus-date trade-off.
• Noticing change. A falling trend can point to growing technical debt, interruptions, or unclear stories, and is worth raising in a retrospective.

Common misuses

• Comparing teams. Each team’s points are relative to its own past work, so one team’s 30 is not comparable with another’s 15.
• Setting a velocity target. Pressure to raise the number tends to inflate estimates rather than speed up delivery.
• Counting unfinished work. Giving partial credit makes velocity overstate what the team can deliver.

How East Agile Tracker does it

• Velocity is calculated from your history. A story counts once it reaches the project’s done state — Finished, Delivered, or Accepted, chosen per project. See Velocity.
• The averaging strategy is configurable: the last 3, 5, or 10 iterations, or a manual value. New projects start from an initial velocity until they have history. A manager can also override a single iteration’s velocity from the Current column’s header.
• Velocity plans the iterations. The Backlog projects the upcoming iterations from velocity, and with auto-plan iterations on, the current iteration fills to your velocity and no further. See Planning an iteration.
• The trend is on the Metrics page alongside the burndown and the stories carried over between iterations. See Metrics.

Further reading

• What are story points? — the unit velocity is measured in.
• User stories and iteration planning — planning an iteration with velocity.
• eXtreme Programming — where “yesterday’s weather” comes from.