Which of the following statements is true?

In order to reward high performing teams with a bonus, an organization’s head of delivery has asked managers to compare Scrum Teams to identify the best Agile Teams.

Which of the following statements is true?
A . Compare teams by measuring their defect trends, innovation rate, technical debt and velocity.
B. Comparing performance between teams results is not a healthy practice.
C. Standardize the meaning of story points across teams to compare their performance based on completed story points.
D. The Teams with the highest velocity are performing better.

View Answer

Answer: B

Explanation:

Velocity is the amount of work, measured in story points, completed by the team in a single sprint. Velocity is frustrating because it is often used inappropriately. Teams that are new to Scrum will assume that velocity represents the team’s productivity, and this is not the case. If a team allows this misunderstanding to go uncorrected, there is a danger that they will be asked for ” … a report that compares velocities between teams". Different teams will have different expertise, different experience and different team objectives. This is all reflected in the teams’ velocity making it unique for each team. So attempting to compare velocities between different teams is to compare different units of measure. The velocity is exclusively owned by the Developers. It merely provides the team itself and the Product Owner with an indication of how much work can be done within one Sprint. Leave the velocity at the Developers. You already know what the costs are; you know the composition of the team, you know how long the Sprint takes, so you can calculate the costs per Sprint per team. If you wish to compare, compare based on value, on the outcome, not on output. Standardizing the Story Points across teams is not a good idea either. When Teams know their success or compensation depends on a metric or a report, they may feel tempted pushed to game the system to not be seen as losers or just to get the prize. For instance, they can easily inflate the estimates to show a higher velocity. In such a system, the team will focus more on producing good numbers for the ones that observe them rather than focusing on generating value.