Velocity in Scrum: How is it Measured and Does it Equal Value?

Ron Jeffries is generally considered the creator of story points, from which velocity is derived.

His "Story Points Revisited" article is a worthwhile read.

https://www.ronjeffries.com...

"Story points" are a relative sizing of the effort, risk and complexity of the PBI, at least as I coach teams. Use them if they're helpful. Story points are not attributes of each individual's tasks rolled up to accomplish a PBI.

Velocity is simply story points delivered over time, assuming your team is not using some 1 point = 1 day type of approach as is common in SAFe implementations. Velocity should vary. In practice it will have an average over time for stable teams with stable work. I don't see that stability a lot in the gov space where I work. Velocity should be used very, very cautiously, if at all, to gauge capacity for sprint and/or release planning.

"Value" is not Velocity. Value has many aspects: customer value, market value, user value etc. Value can be calculated in dollars, subscribers, time-saved, increased quality, customer delight/happiness and many other ways. Find what moves the needle in your organization.

Knowing the relative effort, risk and complexity of a PBI along with its anticipated value, teams and organization can make smarter decisions on what to build next.

You can't pre-measure Value. You can only estimate the Value, which then needs to be validated once released into Production (which I've seen very few orgs do). Velocity using story points is entirely worthless if you don't understand story points, which is the case for many or most teams. I see teams all the time that size stories (don't even get me started on how they also don't even know what a User Story is!) without any baseline, so the most important part of story pointing, which is relativity, isn't even used making all of your estimating entirely worthless. The longer I'm around the more I dislike story points and estimating. Just learn how to create real User Stories (INVEST) that, through some decision-making process, your PO has determined are valuable, implement them and then use throughput to calculate your velocity. That eliminates all the time spent estimating today that, from what I witness, is a waste of time.