PragmaticBookshelf

PragmaticBookshelf

Devtalk Sponsor

Escape Velocity (PragProg)

Benefit from 15 years of experience working with teams on how to use metrics in a healthy way to improve the way they deliver software products.

Doc Norton

Time and time again, I find teams struggling with velocity as a genuinely helpful metric.

In some cases, it is a relatively harmless albeit poor tool for planning work. But too often, it is a detrimental means of holding teams to ill-informed commitments which ultimately exacerbates many of the team’s core issues. All of this in search of the answer to “How long will it take?”

In Escape Velocity we consider better alternatives to velocity as a metric and look at how other data such as lead time, flow, customer satisfaction, and team joy can not only help a team improve delivery, but provide better answers to “When will this be done?”

Escape Velocity is the result of over 15 years of experience working with teams on improving the way they deliver software products.

In the mid 2000s, I started seeing detrimental patterns of behavior across teams practicing some form of agile; especially those who had chosen the Scrum framework. These patterns were directly related to or at least influenced by the use of velocity as a metric, and I found myself coaching teams away from velocity.

As time passed, my understanding of metrics, their potential influence on teams, alternatives to velocity, and more successful and sustainable approaches deepened. My ability to explain why velocity was insufficient as a metric grew more informed, as did my knowledge of what to do instead.

I eventually codified much of that knowledge into the book, Escape Velocity. While on the surface, Escape Velocity may appear to be an anti-velocity treatise, it is actually about how to use metrics in a healthy way, what pitfalls to look out for, and what metrics can better serve the team and the organization in the pursuit of excellence.

This work was written and produced entirely by the author. We are proud to be distributing it.


Founder of Doc Norton & Associates, Doc is passionate about working with teams to improve delivery, helping leaders be more effective, and building great organizations. Once a dedicated code slinger, Doc has turned his energy toward helping teams, departments, and companies work better together in the pursuit of better software. Working with a wide range of companies such as Groupon, Ford, and Covered Insurance, Doc has applied tenants of agile, lean, systems thinking, and host leadership to develop highly effective cultures and drastically improve their ability to deliver valuable software and products.


Don’t forget you can get 35% off with your Devtalk discount! Just use the coupon code “devtalk.com" at checkout :+1:

Where Next?

Popular General Dev topics Top

PragmaticBookshelf
Successful technical blogging is not easy but it’s also not magic. Use these techniques to attract and keep an audience of loyal, regular...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Free and open source software is the default choice for the technologies that run our world, and it’s built and maintained by people like...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Express your customers’ wild ideas as a set of clear, executable specifications that everyone on the team can read. Feed those examples i...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
The Pragmatic Programmers classic is back! Freshly updated for modern software development, _Pragmatic Unit Testing in Java 8 With JUnit_...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Fire in the Valley is the definitive history of the personal computer, drawn from interviews with the people who made it happen, written ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Build your own languages with ANTLR v4, using ANTLR’s new advanced parsing technology. In this book, you’ll learn how ANTLR automatically...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
You have so much you need to accomplish today. Your list is a mile long and you find yourself getting interrupted every other minute. You...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Success in today’s IT environment requires you to view your career as a business endeavor. In this book, you’ll learn how to become an en...
New
CommunityNews
Foreword No point in wasting words here, folks, let’s jump straight into the C code: E((ck?main((z?(stat(M,&t)?P+=a+'{'?0:3: ...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Use your unique expertise to create content marketing that attracts clients to you. Johanna Rothman @jrothman Ready to become an in...
New

Other popular topics Top

DevotionGeo
I know that these benchmarks might not be the exact picture of real-world scenario, but still I expect a Rust web framework performing a ...
New
Exadra37
I am thinking in building or buy a desktop computer for programing, both professionally and on my free time, and my choice of OS is Linux...
New
PragmaticBookshelf
Rust is an exciting new programming language combining the power of C with memory safety, fearless concurrency, and productivity boosters...
New
AstonJ
Thanks to @foxtrottwist’s and @Tomas’s posts in this thread: Poll: Which code editor do you use? I bought Onivim! :nerd_face: https://on...
New
AstonJ
I have seen the keycaps I want - they are due for a group-buy this week but won’t be delivered until October next year!!! :rofl: The Ser...
New
mafinar
Crystal recently reached version 1. I had been following it for awhile but never got to really learn it. Most languages I picked up out o...
New
AstonJ
Biggest jackpot ever apparently! :upside_down_face: I don’t (usually) gamble/play the lottery, but working on a program to predict the...
New
AstonJ
We’ve talked about his book briefly here but it is quickly becoming obsolete - so he’s decided to create a series of 7 podcasts, the firs...
New
New
First poster: joeb
The File System Access API with Origin Private File System. WebKit supports new API that makes it possible for web apps to create, open,...
New