Comment by skybrian
We were doing “velocity” at a startup using a rack of index cards. Software is not strictly necessary when everyone is in the same room.
We were doing “velocity” at a startup using a rack of index cards. Software is not strictly necessary when everyone is in the same room.
That concept of velocity is in the original Extreme Programming practice, which predates Pivotal, and it was indeed done with racks of index cards.
It's explained pretty clearly in the first edition of Extreme Programming Explained, but i can't find a copy of that online right now. The second edition was absolutely ruined for some reason, but still contains a rough description of it:
> Whichever units you use, hours or points, you will need to deal with the situation where actual results don't match the plan. [...] If you are estimating in points, modify the budget for subsequent cycles. A simple way to do this, dubbed "yesterday's weather" by Martin Fowler, is to plan in any given week for exactly as much work as you actually accomplished in the previous week.
Tracker uses some kind of rolling average rather than just last week's number, but it's the same idea.
Yes, that’s basically how we did it. Though not formally accounting for vacation days; there were four of us and we didn’t have people coming and going much. We only did it once a week during the retrospective. It’s not hard to add up story points for the week and remember what you did in previous weeks. You could enter it into a spreadsheet if you want to get fancy.
The concept comes from Extreme Programming. Software implementations came later. I think Pivotal Tracker does something useful, but you need a larger team for it to matter.
Here are some photographs of the team room:
> I think Pivotal Tracker does something useful, but you need a larger team for it to matter.
My buddy and I built what ended up being an $80m/yr gross revenue business entirely using PT for ourselves. We shipped a MVP exactly to the week we predicted. It helped that we both worked at Pivotal and knew exactly how to use PT correctly.
You certainly were early with the process and I applaud you for that! PT wasn't released until 2008.
PT's concept of velocity isn't just tracking a number. It is tracking what work will get done within a period of time based on the average amount of work done previously. It allowed PM's to actually estimate when a feature would be completed and how adding or removing stories (or people!) would impact future feature deadlines. Initial velocity was meaningless and only developed over time as an average value of a team of people working together, taking into account things like vacations and sick days. None of this could be done realtime with a rack of index cards as it was something that happened over many weeks.