How can I stop my Scrum velocity from changing?

Question

I have an issue where a different number of man hours is being worked during each sprint. This is messing up my velocity.

How do you account for new team members being added and people spending time working on other projects when planning for Scrum?

Answer 1

How do you measure the size of your items? We use storypoints and you could calculate your velocity in hours/storypoint. If you know the numbers of hours available for a sprint you can calculate how many storypoints you can implement.

Answer 2

It's ok for the velocity to change over time for any reason.

If you know there are changes in the available effort (more or less people, more or less working days), you can adjust the new sprint's velocity estimate accordingly. Historical velocity data is just there to guide you in the velocity estimation process.

Velocity is just a measure that calibrates the team's actual productivity to software size units (story points, ideal work hours, gummi bears, whatever) over time.

Of course, it's not very wise to vary sprint duration all the time, or to change the team composition all the time, or to have people working on multiple projects at the same time. But sometimes it just happens.

Answer 3

About the problem of new members being added, I hope this is something that doesn't happen very often. Agile teams arguably shouldn't have more than 7 members. If they do, you should break in two teams. If it is changing just for now, it's ok to see the velocity change until the whole team is familiar with the product they work on.

About the time working in other projects, IMHO, I see those as obstacles, but in this case, I hope these can be predicted. If possible, try to reduce this time as much as possible, the project team should be responsible for the project, and shouldn't "borrow" staff from other team. Anyway, if this time working for other teams can be predicted, you can whether create a story for it, or estimate considering how much time will be "lost" with this.

Anyway, it's normal for the velocity to change, but you should be able to know the reason from the retrospective, and then change what's not working, and keep what's working for ur team. If agile methodology isn't working for you, just change it, so it will be great for your team.

Hope I helped :)