More speed, lower velocity

I frequently meet software teams who describe themselves as “high velocity”, they even have graphs coming from Jira to prove it, and yet their ability to ship great software, to delight their customers, or even to attract their customers, doesn’t meet their expectations. A little bit of sleuthing usually discovers the underlying problem.

Firstly, let’s take a look at that word, “velocity”. I, like Kevlin Henney, have a background in Physics, and therefore I agree with him that Velocity is a vector, and has a direction. But “agile” velocity only measures amount of stuff done to the system over time, not the direction in which it takes the system. That story may be “5 points” when measured in terms of heft, but is that five points of increasing existing customer satisfaction? Five points of new capability that will be demoed at next month’s trade show? Five points of attractiveness to prospects in the sales funnel?

Or is it five points of making it harder for a flagship customer to get their work done? Five points of adding thirty-five points of technical debt work later? Five points of integrating the lead engineer’s pet technology?

All of these things look the same in this model, they all look like five points. And that means that for a “high-velocity” (but really low-velocity, high-speed) team, the natural inclination is to jump on it, get it done, and get those five points under their belt and onto the burn down chart. The faster they burn everything down, the better they look.

Some of the presenting symptoms of a high-speed, low-velocity team are listed below. If you recognise these in your team, book yourself in for office hours and we’ll see if we can get you unstuck.

• “The Business”: othering the rest of the company. The team believes that their responsibility is to build the thing that they were asked for, and “the business” needs to tell them what to build, and to sell it.
• Work to rule: we build exactly what was asked for, no more, no less. If the tech debt is piling up it’s because “the business” (q.v.) doesn’t give us time to fix it. If we built the wrong thing it’s because “the business” put it at the top of the backlog. If we built the thing wrong it’s because the acceptance criteria weren’t made clear before we started.
• Nearly done == done: look, we know our rolling average velocity is 20 bushels of software, and we only have 14 furlongs and two femtocandela of software to show at this demo. But look over here! These 12 lumens and 4 millitesla of software are in QA, which is nearly done, so we’ve actually been working really hard. The fact that you can’t use any of that stuff is unimportant.
• Mini-waterfall: related to work to rule (q.v.), this is the requirement that everyone do their bit of the process in order, so that the software team can optimise for requirements in -> software out and get that sweet velocity up. We don’t want to be doing discovery in engineering, because that means uncertainty, uncertainty means rework, and rework means lower velocity.
• Punitive estimation: we’re going to rename “ambiguity” to “risk”, and then punish our product owner for giving us risky stories by boosting their estimates to account for the “risk”. Such stories will never get scheduled, because we’ll never be asked to do that one risky thing when we can get ten straightforward things done in what we are saying is the same time.
• Story per dev: as a team, our goal is to shovel as much software onto the runtime furnace as possible. Therefore we are going to fan out the tasks to every individual. We are each capable of wielding our own shovel, and very rarely do we accidentally hit each other in the face while shovelling.