[opensource-dev] SCRUM question: negative daily velocity

[Philippe (Merov) Bossut]

Hi,

On Fri, Aug 20, 2010 at 11:19 AM, Moriz Gupte <moriz.gupte at gmail.com> wrote:

> May I venture to share these questions:
> Regarding the snowstorm sprint2 backlog: I have always tried to observe
> other teams using scrum and I have a question regarding negative daily
> velocity values. I am not familiar with this and am thinking if this is the
> case, then it could mean that burndown graph Y axis would need negative
> values as well?? What does negative daily velocity actually mean? just a
> reflection of a task having been underestimated?
>

I'm not the Scrum Master (it's Esbee :) ) but I think the issue with the
scrum spreadsheet is 2 folds:
1. contingent reason - I (and may be others) was confused as to what to
report in the daily hours for each task. I was putting the time spent
instead of the time remaining on a task so it never got to zero. I see
"Done" tasks still mentioning time which seems strange. Today, I fixed my
tasks looking at how Esbee have done with hers, i.e. chipping down time from
the total.
2. scrum reason - As we go through a task, we may (and often do) discover
new problems that need fixing and that we end up adding to the tally. That
actually creates a "negative velocity" if all you look at is the burndown
chart, i.e. the total remaining.

Cheers,
- Merov
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