Hello Scrum Masters
I came across a new information about team velocity recently during an interview which I never knew.
The interviewer asked me my team size and its velocity. When I answered, I was told that, it was too low. She said, “There is an industry standard velocity for a certain team size. For example, for a team of seven members, the velocity should be minimum 55”.
Is this correct?
Industry standard? Nope.
SAFe has an idea that you can start with roughly “a point equals a day” as an initial guess when you have no data, and you have about 8 days for work in a 10 day sprint. That would give you 56 points for a team of 7.
But that’s just for an initial guess.
The “no estimates” crowd do it a bit the same’ split the work down to stories that take a person about a day, so you’d get to a similar number maybe?
Sounds like they have half-understood some stuff and have no real idea about how and why a team uses planning poker or estimation.
A good counter interview question is “how much autonomy do teams have?” …
Velocity is an indication of the average amount of Product Backlog turned into an Increment of product during a Sprint by a Scrum Team, tracked by the Development Team for use within the Scrum Team.
There is no such thing as a Good Velocity or a Bad Velocity.
Remember, it is based on relative estimations.