Understanding sprint velocity fluctuations for improved project plans with Scrum: a case study

Abstract

Starting from the documentation of high sprint velocity fluctuations in a Scrum project, this paper presents a thorough approach to identify the sources of issues arising in the context of Scrum implementation. Given that Scrum provides guidance on identifying process issues but not their root causes, various approaches are explored. This is of great relevance because Scrum defines project schedules relying heavily on sprint velocity and because it is the most widely used agile methodology. The findings provide a new approach to evaluate such fluctuations and establish a more realistic project assessment than what is currently defined by Scrum. In this respect, this paper contributes to improve the understanding of the software development process using this agile framework. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The connections between group maturity, software development velocity, and planning effectiveness

“…Albero Pomar et al proposed 2 techniques for predicting future performance of scrum software teams. The first approach relies on plotting the accrued velocity for all previous sprints to identify the trends (downward or upward) of performance.…”

“…They also proposed exploiting a traditional (nonagile) project management metric to gauge the amount of completed work over the planned work. The metric is calculated as the ratio of the total earned points over the total points planned in the sprint planning meeting …”

“…In other words, no points are given for any work done until it gets accepted. Based on this, we used the Schedule Performance Indicator (SPI) to measure the effectiveness of the scrum teams in planning their stories and delivering the expected outcome. In this current research, we use the term “planning effectiveness” to describe the teams' ability to deliver the planned work as expected in relation to customer value represented by the product owner.…”

Comparing Measured Agile Software Development Metrics Using an Agile Model-Based Software Engineering Approach versus Scrum Only

“…velocity fluctuation (VF) is a vital graph that product managers watch during sprint planning and execution because it helps them plan more accurately for future sprints. VF has been studied to identify the sources of issues arising in scrum implementations, and it was found that fluctuations in velocity are caused by the team missing their commitments that, in turn, depend on the unaccounted complexities of different sub-systems [56].…”

“…VF is another way to monitor SV, and it represents the SV variance from the average. Monitoring the VF helps analyze the root cause of the team missing their commitment [56] and is calculated as the following:…”