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Story Points and Changing Sprint Duration

Last post 04:01 am May 30, 2020 by Ian Mitchell
2 replies
ALA SOLSVIG
06:34 pm May 29, 2020

Hi everyone. I am a program manager for a program of 22 teams. A few months back, we changed from 1 week sprints to 2 week sprints, and lengthened our releases form 4 weeks (4 1 week sprints) to 6 weeks (3 2 week sprints). The amount of story points completed as a program has increased about 30% from 4 week releases to 6 week releases, as opposed to a linear 50%. The overall amount of work getting done, however, does not appear different given throughput of milestones reached by teams. So, I'm wondering if anyone has seen this phenomenon of lengthening a release, but not seeing a linear increase in the amount of story points completed. It's worth noting that team composition has been pretty stable across all teams during this time, and that several teams have adjusted their reference stories to adjust to longer sprints and releases. 

Thomas Owens
11:53 pm May 29, 2020

I don't think it's necessarily strange. Velocity is highly impacted by changes to a team's way of working. Increasing the Sprint duration can increase the likelihood that something unplanned arises in the Sprint. A good team is also refining their Definition of Done and increasing the mandatory quality of their work, which may add effort to each unit of work. Maybe there's more overhead in coordination to make sure that the product remains in a stable state, perhaps from the change in Sprint duration or perhaps from growing product complexity.

In the end, it's not useful to use Velocity as a long-term metric and it's better suited to applying Yesterday's Weather. Process improvements from Retrospectives or other environmental changes can impact it.

Rather than focusing on Velocity, which is a measure of output, focus on the outcomes. Is the customer and user satisfied with the work being done by the teams? Are the teams meeting their Sprint Goals?

Ian Mitchell
04:01 am May 30, 2020

we changed from 1 week sprints to 2 week sprints, and lengthened our releases form 4 weeks (4 1 week sprints) to 6 weeks (3 2 week sprints).

What makes these Sprints, in your view? What is planned to be released after each one? On what basis does inspection and adaptation then occur?

The amount of story points completed as a program has increased about 30% from 4 week releases to 6 week releases, as opposed to a linear 50%. 

What value is being released after each Sprint? How is it being used and accounted for?

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