Total velocity v true (feature) velocity

It’s hard enough to know that teams are delivering consistently and being able to demonstrate this with a solid velocity. It’s great to get them into the habit of thinking that everything is a story – features, defects, technical debt – it’s better that we measure this and declare it than hide it away. So I don’t want to make it even more difficult – but what we often need to keep an eye on is the velocity on features – what I like to call “true velocity”. I call it this from a solid project management perspective, it’s great that the team have a solid and consistent total velocity of “v” but what I’m interested primarily in is how many story points we got done on new features – essentially this is

Vtrue = Vtotal – Vdefects – Vtechnical debt.

This is important because when determining the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) for a release this is nearly always measured in features, there may be cases when the MVP includes essential defects but the features are far more likely to be the key for a release. The MVP will describe the features required to then be able to market compelling reasons to buy the product – so features are more important then defects and technical debt. How they are compared is decided by Product Owner and key stakeholders, in my next blog we’ll look at some aspects to this that can provide options, even be advantageous for a Project Manager…