Can velocity be used to measure Productivity ?

I have heard many managers in software companies trying to measure productivity based on Velocity of the team. I think it makes no sense.

Here are some of my thoughts:

1. Velocity is measure of team's capacity to deliver certain functionality within a specified interval. This definition makes it clear that, one cannot use the velocity as the stick during appraisal and performance evaluation for individual members.

2. You cannot use velocity to measure the productivity between teams also. Reason being, each team is different. Two teams with 10 developers each, cannot be compared. Each team would come from varied years of experiences, domain knowledge, maturity, support from product owners, communication skills, etc.

Toyota and moment of Zen

Here is a very good article for all who would like to improve on a daily basis. I could related many of the practices in this article to scrum meetings and retrospectives. Must read for entrepreneurs and managers to create a learning organization.

http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/111/open_no-satisfaction.html

Velocity and more

Here is nice article from Mike Cohn about Velocity

I find that one of the most common mistakes teams make is to use the
term "velocity" to refer to both
--the number of points (or ideal days) finished in a sprint
--the amount of planned work completed in a sprint

It is far more useful to use velocity to refer to the amount of
points finished in a sprint. The amount of work planned in a sprint
will be relatively constant sprint to sprint. This is essentially the
Y (vertical) intercept of a sprint burndown chart. If you need a term
for that call it "capacity." The tough concept for some teams to get
is that capacity (# of hours of work planned into a sprint) isn't
clearly correlated to the # of hours worked in a sprint. To make it
simple, consider me a team of one doing a one-week sprint. I will
work 40 hours this week. If I'm a perfect estimator (impossible) I
can say "I'll answer email for 20 hours this week (I wish!) and spend
20 developing; let me pull in 20 hours of work during sprint
planning." However suppose I'm not perfect and that my backlog items
have some uncertainty. Over time I may find that when I see a pile of
work and say "that's 15 hours" that this is the amount that perfectly
fills up my 40 hour workweek. I may get 25 hours of time on task to
do what I called 15 or I may get the 15 done in 12. It won't matter.
What matters is that what I call 15 fills up my week. That's how to
plan sprints and to work with capacity.

Pros and Cons of conducting retrospectives

Here is a nice article about retrospectives

Retrospectives

Written by willem

Tuesday, 14 February 2006

After an event or project, all the stakeholders come together to celebrate the successes of the project, and learn from failure in a constructive manner without finger-pointing. After a retrospective participants have concrete actions for the next event or project, and can contain broader organisational change. Retrospective benefits: Closure Learning from our own mistakes Learning from someone else's mistakes Acknowledging aligned practices and accomplishments Rewriting organizational stories Learning a healthy ritual Discovering strengths of the organization Clarifying aligned roles for players Allowing to connect emotionally Challenging each others assumptions Providing an overview of what's actually happening in the organization Building trust across boundaries Clear results, that lead to realistic commitments Retrospective risks: Emotional upset Unrealized expectations Lack of follow up leading to frustration and distrust Last minute sabotage Repercussions and retaliations Loss of control at the top Increase in awareness of personal responsibilities and accountability And of the chasm between responsibilities and accountability Can be a life style changing event Discovering that you waited too long to do aretrospective Discovering some of your assumptions are invalid Risks of not doing retrospectives: Emotional upset piles up Repeating mistakes over and over again Carrying forward unhealthy relationships Not using an opportunity for sustaining and reinforcing best practices Lack of adaptivity Less access to hidden wisdom Not having your assumptions challenged Would have could have should have thinking Learning organization is not learning Getting stuck in causality loops Less access to hidden resources Retrospectives can provide lessons on architecture, planning, communication, product information flow and possible early intervention points.

Tips on Iteration Planning

Stumbled upon the 17 tips to iteration planning . Even though there are more to it, one can add, but definitely these are the ones to start off with !!

Dos and Donts during Planning Poker

Here are some of the tips that could help during planning poker estimation sessions

1. Ensure that all developers show the estimation cards in one shot. If the cards are shown serially chances that it could lead to "estimation influence" factor.

2. Don't sit in crumpled space during this session. Try to use a large room, and people sitting in such a way that they can see each other

3. People who have no idea of use case or requirements can opt out of the session. They need not be forced to be present.

4. Have a spreadsheet open and the computer connected to a projector ready. This would help all the team members to see the requirements clearly.

Please note that, Planning poker estimation, even though more light weight and accurate than other estimation techniques, it could lead to in accuracies. The inaccuracies results from inadequate estimations in the technology or domain that they are working on.

Pair Programming benifit in a short sentence

Pairing takes about 15% more effort than one individual working alone, but produces results more quickly and with 15% fewer defects [Cockburn & Williams]. Fixing defects costs more than initial programming [Boehm], so pair programming is a net win. -- Jim Shore

Relation between Sales men, Process and project delivery

Is there any relation among sales men, Process and project delivery. Whether you agree it or not, I strongly see a relation here. Consider a scenario where, the sales person bids a project for a software organization, and gets the project. Now, the job of the salesperson is over, and the next step is for the delivery team to take responsibility and deliver the project on time to the customer.
As we are aware, project delivery is controlled by the scope, time and cost. Any change happening to one or more of the parameters has impact on others. If the time is committed to the customer as in fixed bid fixed time project, then we need to ensure that scope and cost are also in line. If the sales person has gone and committed a particular time line to the customer making assumptions on estimations, it is going to directly impact the delivery and the developers have to go through terrible stress (assuming he is over committed) during implementation.

Let us talk about the impact of above two parameters onto process. Let us take the project following agile methodology. Estimation in agile projects is done using IEH(Ideal Engineering Hours). In the projects I have seen, IEH is anywhere from 6-61/2 hrs per day.
What if sales person is not aware of the IEH and sells the project with 8 Hours per day in mind ? Who will work that extra 1 1/2 hours committed by the sales person ? How do you compensate for this ? I know that you know the answers to above questions !!!!