In Scrum, the velocity is defined as amount of work that the team can handle in one sprint. This is an important measure as it is used to plan the future iterations and to verify that the team is progressing at a constant and comfortable pace. In this blog post, Agile coach Rachel Davies presents a FAQ on how to calculate velocity.
The goal of this FAQ is to clear up any confusion about counting team velocity before story prioritisation. The velocity is averaged over the past 3 iterations to level things out. The post suggests answers for important and practical questions like “Should I partially count a story if we did some work on it but it hasn’t been finished?”, “If the story was signed off and complete and then later we discover it has problems, Should we add another story for the extra work to fix it?”, “We had to do some story work in an iteration that wasn’t planned in because the story was not finished from a previous iteration (due to any reason including dependency on other team). What do we do?” or “We did an extra piece of work it took about 2 points worth, it was never planned in or estimated can I count it now because we did do it?”.
For each of these questions and some more, Rachel Davies suggests answers that can be use as working agreements on this topic.
Read the complete blog post on http://agilecoach.typepad.com/agile-coaching/2014/04/calculating-velocity-faq.html