Various models, techniques, and tools can assist with effort estimation in software project management. An agile software project involves iterative development, in which customer feedback informs future iterations. This means estimations and planning need to be updated over time. Scrum teams use three levels of planning to accomplish this: release planning, sprint planning, and daily planning. Software development based on agile principles has adopted scrum widely due to its significant impact on project productivity. In addition to enhancing product quality, boosting client satisfaction, reducing costs, and motivating teams, scrum offers a number of additional advantages. Software development often overlooks softer factors, but they play a critical role in technical development and understanding them can enlighten us. In developing software, productivity factors vary according to the business domain. Reusability is one of the most important factors in determining productivity, accounting for more than a third of the time software developers spend on non-technical tasks.
Traditionally, software development productivity is measured using lines of code and story points. During sprints, velocity is an agile metric measuring the work completed. A story point is usually expressed as several hours, although it can also be expressed in story points. The story points earned during a sprint are calculated by adding all user stories completed. Among the most influential metrics for agile teams are velocity and effort estimates. An organization’s velocity is its speed combined with its direction. In summary, sprint velocity measures how many story points a team completes during a sprint. What is the purpose of this? This information is essential for a variety of reasons such as: It is possible to predict how much coverage the user stories will have and plan the project accordingly or by understanding the team’s capability, we can commit user stories at the right time.
Depending on estimated story points, sprint velocity indicates how quickly a development team can produce user stories. A team’s velocity from the first sprint helps gauge its capacity and guides future sprint planning. Most teams determine their velocity after two or three sprints. Each sprint’s workload is estimated using story points, which measure the complexity or size of tasks. Based on these estimates, the team determines how much work can be accomplished during a sprint or release. As each team calibrates story points to fit its capabilities, they should not be compared across teams.
Ideally, an agile team reaches a stable velocity that gradually increases, allowing better sprint planning. In agile methods, a consistent velocity is an important indicator of a well-functioning development process. Agile teams with steady velocity are well aligned with each other and their development processes. Playing a pivotal role in improving future sprint planning, the product manager closely monitors velocity fluctuations during sprint planning and execution. Volatility fluctuations are often attributed to teams missing their commitments, which are often caused by unexpected complexity in different subsystems. Agile process metrics measure how well planning, execution, and delivery are working. The goal of these flow-based metrics is to identify and resolve issues related to flow, like bottlenecks.
