Remember your very first sprint planning meeting as a developer?

When I joined my first team, I had 12 weeks of knowledge of JavaScript and React. All I was concerned about was “How do I deliver great results with my limited experience?”. The only solution I could come up with back then was to just code, code, and code until someone showed me a better way: Sprint Reliability.

What if you could understand the process of your work in a way where you could give accurate estimates? What if you and your team were so in sync that you could determine how long it would take your team to complete tasks?

Understanding how you can achieve sprint reliability and evaluate velocity correctly allows you to deliver consistent results. Let me explain these terms and show you why sprint reliability truly matters.

Agile

Let’s start by understanding what agile teams are and why we need agile software development. Agile Software Development is a set of methods and practices where solutions evolve through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams. Agile decreases the amount of advanced planning needed to get projects started and gets you a complete product/feature quicker. However, companies that are new to agile are troubled with team-output-predictability. This is where velocity acts as an excellent metric for estimating the speed of your team.

Velocity & Sprint Reliability

Velocity is the amount of work your team gets done in a set sprint, usually two weeks. It can be measured in person-hours, tasks, story points, or whatever other units of measurement you use for estimating work.

Averaging the daily velocities over the course of a week allows you to calculate the team’s Sprint Reliability.

Note: We are only counting work that is marked as ‘Done’. Partially completed work should almost always be carried over to the next sprint and not count towards completed work within a given sprint. When repeatedly encountered, partially completed work can be a sign of bad planning, inadequate story splitting, and a need for adjustment of story points brought into a sprint. By not counting unfinished work, we motivate teams to story point their work in smaller pieces, so they can complete them during an iteration.

Using the velocity of only one sprint to make predictions for future sprints is not very useful. We all have productive and less productive sprints. Therefore, tracking the progress of an agile team for several months will help get a better average.

With an already-estimated user stories backlog, velocity could be predicted way ahead. It would help us make a good guess what features we would be able to deliver in upcoming releases. Even though velocity is a great at-a-glance performance forecasting tool, its primary use is to help gauge how much work can be achieved in a given sprint compared to similar work in prior sprints. For this reason, paying attention to how one iteration varies to another is much more important than the absolute number. Less volatility leads to more reliable forecasts.

A great factor to sprint reliability is long-lasting, cohesive teams that have worked together for many sprints and already feel comfortable estimating their work together. Great teams consistently improve the way they work to deliver high-quality software. If there is high turnover, the velocity of the team will be much less meaningful. The same is true if your product backlog is missing. Working overtime to achieve the desired velocity each sprint does not lead to an accurate calculation.

Now, what if there were changes to the scope during the iteration? Let’s say new urgent unplanned work was given to the team by product management, which could not wait until the next iteration. We have all had this happen. Such unexpected changes can be visualized by adding an additional metric to indicate added scope.

Conclusion

Whether you are a new or senior developer, understanding and correctly utilizing sprint reliability is the method to accelerate your productivity within your company. Knowing how much your team is capable of achieving within a sprint will allow you to knock stories out consistently and give managers and those without direct visibility in your team the chance to accurately follow your progress.