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Would love to have different velocity per team member
I suppose this deviates from standard Agile philosophy, but the reality of our small team is that people are not fungible. Some work on projects only part time, and only in certain areas. Our estimates would be better if we could assign velocity on a per-team-member basis, rather than it being an aggregate of the team.
I’m concerned
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The company has not planned to implement this.
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Inappropriate?OMG. Dangerous. Might be good for 5% of agile implementations (perhaps yours), but has the potential to adversely influence the 80% who wouldn't know to totally ignore this number and look at it skeptically.
I’m oh noes!
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Inappropriate?It takes me four hours to do some HTML/CSS work but our graphic designer can probably finish the task in 30 minutes. Meanwhile, I might be the only one capable of writing a particularly nasty SQL query.
We would need to estimate each story for each employee, and then use some heuristics to figure out optimal assignments.
Agile is just silly on this point. Developers are NEVER fungible. There's always big differences in skill sets and familiarity with the codebase. Ignoring this fact leads to nonsense estimation.
I’m in violent agreement
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This is one of the best points
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I agree with Sam on this point. Measuring individuals breaks team unity, which affects overall velocity. I suppose it depends what you want to optimize though. If you want to optimize the rate at which you deliver value to your customers measure team velocity. If you want to optimize individuals' effort then, well, measure individuals. -
Inappropriate?Velocity is a measurement of a team's capacity; it doesn't translate down to individual team members' abilities, to hours spent on particular tasks or to any idea of productivity. Developers are definitely not fungible and the 'resource profile' of a team, if you micro-manage in the more traditional style, is an essential way to work out what can be done.
In an agile setting, the team accepts a bunch of priorities and the team deals with them, not individuals. This self-management is a crucial component of various agile methodologies, and means that being able to individually measure velocity is impossible.
Remember that a team with a velocity of 10, for example, is not made up of team members with velocities of 3, 4, 2 and 1 - and if they were, a '4' member of staff in one team is not a '4' member in another.
It's a measure of team capacity.
I’m for none of this
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Inappropriate?I am thinking along the same lines. What if I wanted to use PT for a two person project, where none of the team members could perform the tasks of the other team member.
How would I go about prioritizing the features, since I want each iteration to contain more or less the same amount of work for each team member?
Should I as a manager manually sort the features so that they are evenly spread out for each member over each iteration? Should I set up two entirely separate projects?
Seems like that might be the only way to go about it, at least in the context of how PT currently works. Perhaps we are just not meant to use Pivotal Tracker.
I’m unsure
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this is one of the best points
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This is one of the best points
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we have this same "dilemma"... two developers, both with different skillsets and rarely on the same project. For now, we are doing what you suggested and manually ensure that each iteration has enough work for bob and enough work for bill... we are just starting out and so i unfortunately can't tell you the effectiveness of this method yet!
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Inappropriate?I would suggest setting up two separate projects for the situation that Peter describes. Sam is right-on that a velocity is a measurement of the team's work delivered. Since your two team members are working on separate deliverables, they are really two teams of one.
There are some upcoming enhancements to the dashboard that should make managing multiple projects more enjoyable. -
Inappropriate?Note that if you have your own velocity, the incentive is to tackle the things that are easiest for you (think of yourself as the most talented team member). If you are instead trying to optimize your team's velocity, you tackle the things that are relatively harder for your teammates, or at least make sure they have full access to your expertise on them.
Individual velocities could therefore put harder stories in no-man's land and delay your releases. One of the main goals of the Agile process is for your team to teach each other all relevant skill sets.
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