Skip to Content
Agile Estimating and Planning
book

Agile Estimating and Planning

by Mike Cohn
November 2005
Intermediate to advanced
368 pages
8h 50m
English
Addison-Wesley Professional
Content preview from Agile Estimating and Planning

Chapter 16. Estimating Velocity

“It is better to be roughly right than precisely wrong.”

—John Maynard Keynes

One of the challenges of planning a release is estimating the velocity of the team. You have the following three options:

Use historical values.

Run an iteration.

Make a forecast.

There are occasions when each of these approaches is appropriate. However, regardless of which approach you are using, if you need to estimate velocity you should consider expressing the estimate as a range. Suppose you estimate that velocity for a given team on a given project will be 20 ideal days per iteration. You have a very limited chance of being correct. Velocity may be 21, or 19, or maybe even 20.0001. So instead of saying velocity will be 20, ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products, Second Edition

Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products, Second Edition

Jim Highsmith

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780137126347Purchase book