Velocity as Productivity
We continue to see teams and organizations equating velocity with productivity. When properly used, velocity allows the incorporation of yesterday’s weather into a team’s internal iteration planning process. The key here is that velocity is an internal measure for a team, it is just a capacity estimate for that given team at that given time.
Organizations and managers who equate internal velocity with external productivity start to set targets for velocity, forgetting that what actually matters is working software in production. Treating velocity as productivity leads to unproductive team behaviors that optimize this metric at the expense of actual working software.
