My team’s historical story data, what now?
During the discussions about the usefulness of story-point estimation I became increasingly curious about my own team’s predictability. I…
During the discussions about the usefulness of story-point estimation I became increasingly curious about my own team’s predictability. I decided to check our historical information of the past six months.
Our average velocity was 27.5 points per 2 week sprint
Our story size is on average 5.28 story points
Variance of the size of the user stories is 5.81
We picked up 3 stories in 10% of the sprints
We picked up 4 stories in 30% of the sprints
We picked up 5 stories in 30% of the sprints
We picked up 6 stories in 10% of the sprints
We picked up 7 stories in 10% of the sprints
We picked up 8 stories in 10% of the sprints
We are very good in meeting our sprint goals and deliver almost 100%.
The histograph looks like this:
Looking at above figures the average number of stories that fit in a sprint is 5. 30% of our sprint actually had 5 stories. 40% had less, 30% had more stories.
You could argue that it might be beneficial to drop the two week’s sprint altogether and instead continuously plan with average story sizes. We however will stick to the 2 week sprint for various reasons.
Having said that, I do not see the benefit of using historical average story-sizes for our sprint planning. Our planning would be sub-optimal in 70% of the cases.
Or am I missing something?
Originally published at ageling.wordpress.com on October 3, 2017.