Comparison
Story pointvsVelocity
Story point
the team sized it a five, and someone in a status meeting asked how many days a five is.
A unit of relative size used to compare pieces of work without committing to a duration. It works because humans compare better than they measure, and it stops working the moment anyone converts points to days or compares two teams' points. Most of the arguments about story points are really arguments about that conversion, which is a governance problem rather than an estimation technique.
Full entry →Velocity
the number went up every quarter and the amount of software delivered did not change.
How much work a team completes per iteration, used to forecast how much the next one might hold. It is a capacity-planning input and nothing else; the moment it becomes a target it is trivially inflatable by estimating higher, which is Goodhart's law arriving on schedule. Comparing velocity between teams is meaningless because the unit is defined locally and deliberately.
Full entry →