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    I think it's dangerous for teams to blur the distinction between things that are directly valuable to the user and things that hopefully provide indirect value. In particular, a "everything we like is valuable" approach encourages developer gold-plating and infrastructure for infrastructure's sake. I strongly encourage people only count stories with direct business value toward velocity, because that's the only thing that customers will pay cash money for. Commented Mar 24, 2011 at 17:19
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    Waltzing with Bears. Everything you do that's truly valuable is mostly valuable because nobody has done it before (otherwise there are other, cheaper, ways of getting it done). Most of what we do that's valuable is about learning how to do the new things. The infrastructure tasks help us get feedback on the new things, and learn more quickly. I'm with @Kristo if it helps us learn more quickly. Commented Mar 25, 2011 at 2:10
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    @Lunivore - The difference is that nobody pays you for learning. They pay you for what you do with the learning. Teams should always take some time to improve their tools and their knowledge. But counting it as velocity confuses it with the kind of work that the team is there to do. Commented Mar 26, 2011 at 0:29
  • It's not just about tools and knowledge. Thought experiment from Ashley Johnson: Think about the last project you did. Think about how long it would take to do it again with the same people, same requirements, same technology, but having learnt everything you learnt. Quotes from PMs run at about 25% to 33% - the rest is how much learning we do in software projects. Read Dan North's post on Deliberate Discovery: dannorth.net/2010/08/30/introducing-deliberate-discovery Commented Mar 26, 2011 at 11:59