Velocity, Work, and Time
Velocity = Work / Time
For example, one might say that the velocity of a four-member team is 20 points per week or 80 points per sprint.
Time
To maintain a continuous pace of progress, agile development employs two possible approaches:
- Iterative increment: maintains the pace through a series of sprints. It uses the sprint as a unit of time and expresses velocity as the amount of work completed per sprint. Technical Scrum utilizes iterative increment.
- Continuous increment: maintains a steady flow without downtime or bottlenecks. There are no sprints, and velocity is expressed in points per week, day, or month.
Real time vs. ideal time
It is important to understand the difference between the two:
- Real time: the actual working time, corresponding to the standard workday. For a four-person team with an eight-hour workday, the real time available in a single week is 4 × 8 × 5 = 160 hours.
- Ideal time: the time spent working under conditions of complete focus, without any interruptions, distractions, or context switching. It is used in estimations as a unit of the effort required. Example: "this task has a size of 3 ideal hours."
Ideal time is always less than actual time. A basketball game consists of exactly 40 minutes of play, yet the actual game usually lasts over an hour. Similarly, a task that takes "one ideal hour" might end up occupying half a workday in reality. Managing this discrepancy helps in organizing work more objectively and avoiding the stress caused by unattainable goals.
Work
Measuring work is necessary for two reasons: to track what has already been completed and to estimate what remains to be done.
Work already completed
In Agile management, project progress is not determined by the effort expended, but rather by the work remaining to be done. While other organizational processes may require tracking the effort invested, this should not be used to calculate project progress; a team might put in a great deal of effort while making little actual progress if that work does not translate into a completed increment.
Work remaining to be done
Scrum measures remaining work in order to:
- Estimate the effort and time required to complete user stories and epics.
- Determine the progress of the project and of each individual sprint.
Units of work
Work can be sized by measuring the product being built or the time required to complete it. In Agile management, "points"—or "story points"—are commonly used as a relative unit of work. Each organization defines its own "point." It can be defined based on:
- The relative size of a known task. Example: For an online store team, "one point" might correspond to the size of a user invoice list.
- The ideal time required. Example: "One point equals four ideal hours of work."
What matters is that the definition of a "point" remains consistent across all measurements within the organization and is understood by everyone. == Velocity ==
In technical Scrum, velocity is the amount of work completed by the team during a sprint. A velocity of 150 points indicates that the team completes 150 points of work per sprint.
In pragmatic Scrum—where sprint durations may vary or team size may fluctuate—velocity is expressed with reference to a specific unit of time. Velocity is a team-level metric; using it on a per-person basis for comparison or evaluation distorts the estimation process.
Common Pitfall
Using real time as an estimation unit instead of ideal time. Estimating a story as taking "eight hours"—assuming an eight-hour workday—often leads to unrealistic commitments; meetings, interruptions, context switching, and other tasks consume a significant portion of those eight hours. Estimating in ideal time and applying a realistic conversion factor during sprint planning is more accurate and results in less frustration for the team.
See Also
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