Smarter Management Decisions with Velocity

In this blog post, Steve Andrews discusses the usage of team velocity to plan the next Scrum sprints and how can we use it to make more informed management decisions. Using a quantitative management approach and Agile methods allows us to actually measure the impact of management decisions on the team’s output. He describes the case where the team had a major spike in velocity in one iteration. The cost seems obvious: the team ended up having diminishing returns on velocity in subsequent iterations. It shows that when you work a team unnaturally hard, they will not be able to maintain that level for very long.