Measuring and Improving Development Team Velocity

The speed and effectiveness with which software development teams can produce high-quality code, goods, or solutions is measured by developer velocity. It encompasses the rate at which bug fixes and new features are released, the caliber of the final product, team productivity and cooperation, adaptability, and much more. It represents one of most important development process metrics that measures the amount of work a software development team completes in a specific time period.

Since team composition, domain complexity, and team dynamics all have an impact on teams outcome, development velocity should not be viewed as a direct productivity metric, even though it is helpful for predicting.

Development team velocity can serve as a measure of productivity, but focusing mostly on increasing team velocity may hurt team productivity.

While developer productivity is much more complex and takes into account factors like the impact of the delivered solution in relation to the business strategy or goals, system reliability, and the solutions’ long-term maintainability, developer velocity is more focused on delivering new features quickly and without problems.

1. Few Velocity Metrics

• Frequency of deployment - how often code gets deployed into the production environment
• Fix/Change implementation time - how long it takes for an open pull request to be merged and deployed
• Mean time to recovery - average time to recover from a production failure
• Fix/Change failure rate - the percentage of changes causing production failure
• Code reviews time - how long it takes to review, perform code changes and merging them
• Testing time - time to test and report bugs
• Agile velocity - number of story points completed in a sprint

2. Key Points To Improve Team Velocity

• Evaluate and identify issues with the current development process
• Evaluate development tools and identify bottlenecks
• Take care of the technical debt
• Foster open communication and collaboration
• Monitor, measure and provide performance feedback
• One change at a time, no bulks

3. Hints For Improving Team Velocity

Work In Progress limits:

• Create a limit, one or two items per team member. No additional items until current ones are done
• If it takes too much time to finish the work, consider splitting item into few smaller subitems

Optimize PR process and deployment:

• Keep PRs small so that they are easier to review and make changes if requested
• Aim for small scope releases and deploy more often
• Push for automation

Identify and minimize work that impacts velocity:

• Meetings
• Email notifications
• Team/Slack pings
• Random chats