Category: productivity

Personal Productivity on Agile Teams

August 25, 2009 by Mendelt Siebenga

Personal productivity systems like Getting Things Done or the Pomodoro technique are quite popular among agilists, and I'm not surprised. There are many parallels with agile practices, most of these techniques use practices resembling iterations, backlogs and frequent retrospectives to become more productive. I've been experimenting with a couple of these but once I started using these at work I found that these don't automatically work in a team setting.

Measuring velocity is not enough to determine team productivity

June 20, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Introduction

Another interesting question was brought up in a LinkedIn discussion thread this week: "Is velocity the right approach to measure productivity of team members working in Scrum. If not, then how can productivity of team members be measured in Scrum?" Here are my thought on this topic.

The purpose of velocity

Like burndown charts, velocity is just another metric which the team can use to reach what I believe is the ultimate goal – sustainable throughput. Velocity in my opinion, is not a metric for determining productivity. Productivity or team efficiency is difficult to measure and probably best left for another blog post.

Productivity

August 25, 2008 by Jeremy Weiskotten

Productivity is often confused with velocity. They're related, but they're very different things.

Velocity is the amount of work that you/your team can do in an iteration. In economics terms, productivity is defined as "the ratio of what is produced to what is required to produce" (source: Wikipedia). So, a person who can carve ten statues out of a lump of granite is more productive than a person who can only carve eight statues out of an equal size lump of granite.

At this point it's understood that we can't measure productivity when it comes to building software because there's no good, consistent, accurate way to measure output.

However, while we can't measure our productivity, we can often improve it. Without measurement we won't know how much of an improvement we've gained (or how much we've regressed), but we can measure improvements in velocity, which can indicate corresponding productivity improvements.

Are you assigning your top engineers to projects?

November 5, 2007 by Artem Marchenko

Some companies are very picky at making sure that all their employees got a project to work on. Especially the top engineers. I've seen quite many environments, where senior guys are the ones who have to be "120% utilized" and who are actually doing the work, while juniors are expected to be floating around doing "something not critical" and being asked to help seniors, whenever those would need an extra hand.