How can I check the individual velocity?

Jodi Leunissen November 23, 2015

JIRA is giving me a good view in our team velocity (for example: 30 points a week), but I also want to check the individual velocity (so what's someones peronal velocity) due to different components and varying availability. How can I track this?

Thanks! Cheers,

Jodi

4 answers

5 votes
Mouli July 10, 2019

I would like to raise the question why? Why is the measurement of Individual velocity needed in the first place?

In agile, the focus is to deliver as a team rather than as individuals, which is the reason, stories are planned as a usable incremental feature rather than a task.. like you dont plan a story to complete a java class. The story focuses on the feature, the user / application gets. A few more thoughts on why this is an anti-agile practice.

https://www.targetprocess.com/blog/should-you-measure-individual-velocity/

http://blog.atish.me/2015/01/24/measurement-of-individual-velocity-in-agile-teams/

Individual velocity may de-motivate people, and many managers having it in hands will use it incorrectly. It is very common to revert back to muscle memory of waterfall days and make assignments instead of commitments.

In the end, I think individual velocity is anti-Agile and harm to the team commitment, collaboration and breaks the rule collective ownership. Rather than individual velocity, I would recommend leadership to measure the contribution of individual to the team’s productivity, automation, competence, speed to understand the contribution.

I might have opened a can of worms here.. Please Feel free to disagree so that a healthy discussion can be done on this topic.

Ben Conley July 17, 2019

The answer is to provide quantifiable justification for performance improvement plans.

Yes, team velocity is key to Scrum. Individual velocity is valuable for accountability for under-performing employees though.

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Mouli July 17, 2019

All the more reason not to use Individual Velocity.

1. Velocity is a relative measure whose prime purpose is to abstract away from absolute estimates

1. Velocity is a team metric measured at story level and not intended for measuring Individual performance

1. Scrum is for small teams(~ 8 members). If a team is not able to identify an underperformer in a Scrum team, its the HR practices that needs to be relooked rather than using underhand techniques like Individual Velocity.

1. There are other proven and better ways of identifying an underperformer!

1. Lastly, I have seen underperformers pulling up socks and improving vastly just because of Daily standups (where the same status cannot be repeated every day) & Retrospectives (where issues get pointed out and remedial measures are planned)

Last: Watch this video on why this is detrimental to project health!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nk0xH6bISeE&start=95

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mark hardwick October 18, 2019

There's a lot of this thinking around scrum and it frustrates me.

Jodi is asking for a view of data, nothing more. It's useful to have data when analysing performance. You don't rely on one data set, you take in hard data such as individual velocity and soft data such as you'll find in retros and standup or by talking to the team and in 1:1s.  

The notion that velocity is a reletive estimate and therefore not an appropriate data point doesn't add up, since the point of doing velocity estimates (scrum poker etc) is that, firstly you get better at it, and second the variance cancels out over time, sometimes you're low and sometimes you're high. Therefore, if in a team who are estimating together, you find an individual who is constantly achieving less story points you can look for a reason.  Perhaps that person is way more involved with PRs - there you have a reason, move on, or perhaps that person isn't performing - you talk to them in 1:1s and resolve.  

The point is the data, all data collected in total across multiple touch-points, helps you manage and it's always useful to have data at your fingertips from as many sources as you can get if you want a performant team.

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Mouli March 3, 2020

Sorry.. @mark hardwick .. That rant doesn't hold..

The whole idea of moving away from the PM way of working to Agile way is to ensure the team is self-regulating.. If a small team, doing daily standups, is unable to recognize underperformance of one of its members, then no point in having daily standups..

Another issue: How do you define individual velocity? Story points are assigned to Stories that pass through multiple teams/individuals.. Or is the plan to assign one task to one person and asking him to Story Point it? Then its not Scrum.. There are better ways of working & estimation techniques for that!

A better measure here is Cycle Time.. If the Cycle time for a particular stage is usually high, that helps us zero down on the individual/team who is introducing the latency.. This can be used for PRs & 1:1s..

Individual Velocities derail the Spirit of Scrum.. If you are so insistent on using them, use Feature points or Man hours for estimation instead..

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Sébastien Lemieux January 5, 2021

In my opinion, an application shouldn't force a mantra. While I do agree that individual report doesn't really make sense, not being able to get our data the way we want is worse. I'd like to use individual velocity just to help me support my decision on team assignation when we split our team in smaller groups for smaller project. We do need to explain to our stakeholders how our assignation make sense, and being able to give an estimate of the split team velocity helps.

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Julie Dodd January 8, 2021

thx

AgilePro80 February 11, 2021

@Mouli Your rant doesnt hold.

If you have team estimates and tasks are being fairly distributed any variations in  between individuals within the same team will randomise out over a long enough period of time.

Individual velocity is a useful metric of performance. Over long periods of time you often see developers who have 3x more story point velocity. 

Should this be used in isolation? Of course not. Like any performance metric, you should look at this along with all data points such as peer reviews, manager assessments either.

To say individual velocity is a meaningless metric is ludicrous. I assume you've done very little performance management or you've had to fire under-performers.

Also to state that using individual velocity as micro-managing is also ludicrous as this should be reviewed over longer periods of time (4-12 weeks).

What you are suggesting instead of using data to assess performance is for a manager to subjectively assess the performance of a developer by guessing over a period of time how productive that person. Management research has shown that having objective data is the most efficient way to performance manage direct reports.

Consider any team sport such as soccer, football, basketball. Of course team work is essential to win but looking at individual metrics is also useful to look at performance. 

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2 votes
Raimundas Juska
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November 7, 2018
MJH February 28, 2020

I, personally think its ridiculous that I have to download an additional app to find this info. Hate this Cloud Version of Jira. I can run complex jql in this version. 

Like lkao likes this
1 vote
Arthur Gonçalves
Atlassian Team
Atlassian Team members are employees working across the company in a wide variety of roles.
November 23, 2015

Hey Jodi,

Please check this suggestion at other post on Atlassian Answers. I hope it helps! smile

 

-- Arthur Gonçalves

0 votes
Jodi Leunissen November 24, 2015

Hi Arthur,

Thanks. But I'm using JIRA cloud, not on a server. So I cannot use that plugin. 

Any alternatives?

Thanks, 

Jodi

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