Basic Sprint Metrics in Rally don't add up.

[patrickmcconnell]

I'm a coach working with several Scrum teams, and I'm trying to gauge whether teams are planning realistic Sprints.  One way I look at this is to compare Capacity (what CA and the SAFe people inexplicably call 'Planned Velocity') and Velocity.  Capacity is how many things the team thought would fit in the iteration; Velocity is how many things they finished.  Typically I use sum of estimates, but also just counting Backlog Items will work, too (especially if some or all of the Sprint Backlog wasn't estimated).

 

Unfortunately, there's no report or app that will show me Capacity vs. Velocity in Rally.  But!  I should be able to figure it out based on getting Velocity and Less-than-Accepted counts from either the Iteration Status or Iteration Progress Chart, and squaring that against Scope Changes like this:

 

[Capacity] + ([Things Added] - [Things Removed]) = [Velocity] + [Unfinished Items]

 

or put another way:

 

[Capacity] = [Velocity] + [Unfinished Items] - ([Things Added] - [Things Removed])

 

Except none of those numbers will reconcile.  For example (just using Backlog Item counts instead of points for clarity): Team A completed 5 stories and had 0 unfinished stories at the end of the iteration.  But the Scope Change report says that same iteration the team added 7 stories and removed 0 stories.  That means that the Iteration should show 12 stories, total but none of the charts show anything but 5 stories (including the velocity chart, iteration progress chart, etc.)

 

What gives?

[Legacy User]

Have you looked at the Planned v Actual Burndown app?  It shows a sprint by sprint view of what points were planned (per the Timeboxes page), loaded and completed, and also shows the task burndown numbers if your teams are using tasks.

 

We did have to customize it slightly to look at story points >= 'Accepted', so if the math doesn't work on your teams that may be the issue.

[Jim Tykal]

There's a custom app that might show what you're looking for. It's called the "Iteration Scope Change Chart". It uses LBAPI (look-back API) data to chart out work that was planned/added/removed DURING an iteration. You MUST install this app on an Iteration-filtered page.

One caveat here -- it uses three colors to specify work that is "Defined", "In-Progress", and "Completed/Accepted" -- it doesn't differentiate between Completed vs. Accepted work. (This app was built to spec for a specific customer, so this may not be the behavior you want...) However, it's fairly easy to tweak the code to add another color to the graph for Accepted work,  or to group In-Progress and Completed work together and use the third color for Accepted, because -- as you know -- work isn't done until it's "done-done", i.e., Accepted.)

 

Confusion regarding timebox-based reporting is caused by the source of the data. If a report is using the WSAPI (web services API), you're only seeing work that is scoped to a particular Iteration at the time the report is run. Reports like the Velocity Chart, Sprint Burndown, etc. use WSAPI data.  If a work item is removed from an Iteration prior to running the report, WSAPI data will not include that work item in the Iteration. You would need to use LBAPI (look-back) data to see the history of a work item to determine if it was included in an Iteration DURING the Iteration. The Iteration Scope Change Chart uses this look-back data, so it presents a much more accurate view of what really happened in an Iteration.

GitHub - RallyTechServices/iteration-scope-change-app