Collective Wisdom from the Experts 147
the original estimates might be excessive, and incoming materials or other
project participants would need to know that their tasks may start earlier than
anticipated. Remember, the scope (work) of the project has already been set.
The agile term velocity means measuring the productivity of a developer. It is
used to allow that person to undertake an estimated amount of work for an
upcoming week, not to exceed the amount of work s/he completed last week.
However, since this developer is only being compared to himself and his last
week’s choices, rather than a long-term schedule, there is no need to resched-
ule the work of others. Further, the tasks for this week may be easier, have
fewer bugs, or be more familiar to the programmer.
In the software development project, the functionality of the end product has
not been set in stone. So if the velocity isn’t as fast as originally estimated, the
scope (amount of features delivered) can shrink.
The software project manager who is rolling reports from the software devel-
opment project in with marketing, manufacturing, and training issues needs
a reporting metric. The simplest approach is to give information technology
a block of time (and a corresponding payroll amount) to work on the soft-
ware. On the reports, show five weeks of time, for example. When your IT
team submits weekly software reports, have it also submit the features/stories
completed for you to convert to task names and enter into the report after the
fact. Now those tasks can be updated to show that they are 100% complete as
planned. This allows traditional reports to show agile progress.