Sprint Velocity is a measure of the amount of work your team can handle or complete during a single Sprint and is a key metric in Agile Scrum Project Management.

The estimates for Sprint Velocity can be based on Story Points, Count of tasks or hours committed to the various stories or tasks of the sprint.

Sprint Velocity is key to understanding your team’s true performance and is very helpful for future sprint planning. It can decisively indicate how much work the team can accomplish in the future sprints.

How is Velocity calculated?

Velocity is the sum of estimates (e.g. story points, issue count, task count, number of hours etc.) of completed stories or tasks of a Sprint.

E.g. you have a Sprint with 5 user stories with estimate type as Story points.

Story 1 – 5 story points

Story 2 – 8 story points

Story 3 – 4 story points

Story 4 – 6 story points

Story 5 – 7 story points

And at the end of the sprint you have completed stories 1,2,4 and 5. Then the velocity of the above Sprint is 26.

Tip: Velocity is ALWAYS calculated for the completed stories ONLY. In the above example, story 3 isn’t completed or partially completed and hence would not be considered for calculating velocity.

Velocity helps in accurate forecasting of how many stories the team is capable of handling in a Sprint. For real results, you must take the average of the velocities of a minimum of the last 3 sprints.

You can confidently assess the work the team can commit to for future sprints based on the identified true velocity of the team.

Orangescrum’s velocity chart clearly indicates as to how much of the committed work has been completed by the team for a given sprint.