- one that is useful to the customer – ex:- fixing defects or providing enhancements.
- Required to be done but not useful to customer ex:- update sandbox, technical spike,integration testing etc.
If we take a useful stories as a percentage – 229/343*100 = 66.7%
This lets me define a new terminology – Useful Story Points Percentage or USPP. Sounds like a real term that is widely used in the industry no?
I verified the figures for two previous cadences and the USPP varied between 66 and 75%. Overall we found that the percentage increases if we use a 3 week sprint and reduces when we use a 2 week sprint.
Now, coming to planning,Velocity of a team is supposed to be used by the product owner to plan a cadence. If the team’s velocity is 50 points per sprint, they should be able to finish approximately 50* 4= 200 points worth of user stories in 4 sprints. However, when a product owner creates a backlog, he/she puts in only user stories that are useful to the customer, i.e only enhancements and defects. Hence the team should consider the USPP and take effective velocity into consideration while planning. So, a team can finish only 200 * 0.75 (Velocity * USPP) in a cadence.
So, product owners should take into consideration Effective Velocity of a team while planning for a cadence. I calculated the effective velocity of our team in the last two releases and found that they were very consistent at 57 and 58 points per sprint.Do you know your team’s USPP and Effective velocity?
What do you think about my analysis? Please please do comment