Escape Velocity — Science to get your Scrum Team into Top Gear
By: Rob Healy
Tags: Serious Scrum, Physics, Velocity, Power, Scrum

Figure 1. A trace into space

Defining the terms: In the beginning…

In the beginning, there was a point. Being a singular point, it was all there was. It was the alpha and the omega and it was good.

Then both space and time started in a fashion that became the model beloved by marketing and poor project managers forever after — they were delivered with a Big Bang. Now it was possible to move a distance in space over a period of time. This change in position with respect to time was called Velocity. It too, was good.

Having discovered movement with direction, things now sought to change their velocity over time. This was called Acceleration. It was very good.

Many years later Isaac Newton discovered that the Force required to cause an Acceleration was directly proportional to how big a thing was. Moreover, the energy required to force a thing to move a distance (or otherwise change) could be calculated. As this was always difficult, it was called Work. People could exchange their work for money. Money, in general, in principle, usually, well most of the time, was good.

The rate at which Work could be done in a given time is called Power. Individuals and groups who could get more work done in the same amount of time became powerful. Since more power meant more money, people sought out new, innovative ways of achieving it. They leveraged many machines, contraptions and devices using horses, machines, steam, electricity and eventually computers.

Figure 2. Low velocity, high power a tanker steers through a storm.

Beyond Velocity — Empower your Scrum

Years later, some software development teams started to plan their work using a metric called “velocity”. For many Scrum teams looking to make a commitment at Sprint Planning, past analysis of historic velocity helped make predictions of future velocity. This technique is called “Yesterday’s Weather”.

However, the use of velocity as a measure of work is mistaken. It not about how fast they can go but how much work they can deliver. A supertanker and a carrier pigeon can both move at 19 mph / 30 kph but the former is several orders of magnitude more powerful than the latter. Although the idea of speed is alluring, it would serve individuals and teams far better to recognise that the amount of work being delivered in a Sprint is actually the team’s Scrum Power.

Figure 3. “What’s your Superpower? Mine’s getting work done.”

Once we recognise that a team’s output is work and the ability to deliver it in a Sprint is the power, several interesting conclusions jump out.

For instance, we know from social psychology that social facilitation and teamwork mean that in high-performing teams, the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. However not all team members are created equally and some impact the overall team’s Scrum Power — ability to deliver work — more than others. We usually see this every year when individual team members take annual leave, some barely impact work delivered, while others almost cause a complete shutdown.

One team I worked with previously had a Product Owner who took three weeks vacation (it was her honeymoon) and despite huge effort on her part to prepare adequate coverage, when she returned a single Sprint later the entire body of work had descended into absolute chaos with no deliveries and wholesale war between the stakeholders, team members and management.

The opposite point was a legendary team member who was so obnoxious that when he took annual leave the productivity and quality of the team always increased. Theoretically, this was a very good developer who should have increased the Scrum Power, but instead the productivity, quality and morale all worsened whenever he was in the office.

A second benefit of using the correct units for work and power means that tools and techniques to increase the Scrum Power can be better recognised. For example, if a lack of emphasis on automation is holding back the team then the First Law of Thermodynamics might be useful. It states “Energy cannot be created or destroyed, simply converted from one form to another.” Successful automation replaces manual labour and allows the same amount of work to be done using a computer using electrical energy instead of a human using biochemical energy plus a computer. Also, the computer tends not to get distracted and repeats actions with high fidelity.

It’s very, very difficult and quite unethical to measure the energy consumed by a person in doing a piece of mundane repetitive work but it’s very easy to measure how much energy is used by a computer to do the same. This makes building business cases for investing in automation or reducing technical debt or eliminating other wastes easier to make — simply measure the wasted energy and show that this has a negative impact on the overall Power of the team to deliver.

Get your team into Top Gear

This blog isn’t a call to action to end estimates. That argument has been made extensively elsewhere. Nor is it an argument for outcomes over outputs. Again, the case for that emphasis has been well made by others. Instead it is a polite request that if we are in fact going to measure the work output by a team and use it to help in planning we should at least be using the correct measures and units. All work is a form of energy and needs to be counted as such. The rate at which work is delivered in a period of time is a measure of power (not velocity). It is disempowering to Scrum teams not to inform them that if they deliver more work more effectively and efficiently than their peers and competitors they will become both high performing and powerful. To reiterate Jeremy Clarkson, former presenter of the TV Show Top Gear as he was either screaming round a race track or trying to escape a swamp, “More Power!!!”

Figure 4. TV’s Jeremy Clarkson in action from quickmeme.com

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With thanks to Willem-Jan Ageling, Kunal Shah and Erik de Bos