By looking at the amount of work that a team has done in the previous sprint, one can conclude how much work the team will be able to do in the next sprint. In the sector of Agile development, this feature is known as sprint velocity. With this knowledge by your side, you will be able to plan projects and make predictions about how much work you can aim for and complete in the upcoming sprint. You will also get a clear idea about the resources that you might require, and the effort you need to put in for getting the project completed. To add up, the sprint velocity of a team gives the upper-level management and the stakeholders an idea about when will be the right time to expect the delivery of the product. Click here to learn more on how to estimate sprint velocity.
How to Estimate Sprint Velocity?
Get a record of the work that is previously done, which will help you to know the work that could be done in the next sprint. The Agile Development teams use a story point to measure the amount of work that has been completed in each sprint.
Step1:
At the end of each sprint calculate how many story points a team completes. For instance, in the first sprint, the team aims in completing 5user points and each user story had 6 story points. That makes a total completion of 30 story points. And the team was able to complete 3 out of the 5 user stories.
In sprint 2, the team had 8 user stories which had 6 story points each, which makes a total of 48 story points. The team was able to complete 5 user stories.
In sprint 3, the team had 10 user stories with 5 story points each and they were able to submit 8 user stories.
Step2:
You will need to calculate the number of story points that were completed in each sprint and divide it by the number of sprints.
In sprint 1: 3 user stories X 6 story points= 18 story points
In sprint 2: 5 user stories X 6 story points= 30 story points
In sprint 3: 8 user stories X 5 story points= 40 story points
The total number of story points was 128 out of which 88 were completed.
The average sprint velocity then comes 88/3= 29.3. So on average, the team can complete 29 story points in a sprint. So to complete the remaining story points, i.e, 40 the team will need 1 and a half sprint.