Team Intuition

Velocity reminds me of GDP. It does not account for many types of value & yet we continue to base everything off of it.

— David J Bland (@davidjbland) September 3, 2011

This got me thinking

Scrum is empirical, velocity is measured, amounts of points committed in a sprint is calculated. We constantly improve by reviewing, try new things and evaluating the results. There is much talk about measurement and what we should be measure which is great but as we know from government measurements such as school league tables these measurements are far from perfect and can actually distort progress. They are useful but limited.

After many years of working with the same team we have a feel for whats right and wrong. In the last sprint we ignored velocity and just committed to what we thought we could do. It will be interesting how it works out. Intuition can be wrong too, but together with measurements I think we can make the best decisions.