[roeles]

One of the more interesting things I recently learnt about Agile (by listening to what Joe Justice did at Telsa was), that reaching the sprint goal appears to boost velocity. Thus, in the long run it's better to under-commit slightly than to over-commit. Sadly, I can't find the source for this easily. It's probably somewhere in the hours of interviews Joe gave which are on YouTube.

[scottlilly]

My gut feeling is that there's still good value in frequent demos/checkpoints/etc. It does create a sense of urgency to complete tasks and lets the owner know that progress is really being made.

Besides undercommitting for the sprint, I've seen a lot of point inflation. Developers start padding their story point estimates to allow for extra time.

The worst case I ever saw was a team of five developers breaking down a feature request into very small stories with total points that would require the whole team's workload for two sprints. I completed all those stories by myself in three days. I'm good, but not that good. I suspect the team was so tired/afraid of being admonished by the Product Owner, they just kept padding and padding their estimates.

Of course, no one bothered to look at the cause of the problem behind the developers massively over-estimating required effort. "The Process" is always right, and the people are always wrong. Isn't that the first principle of the Agile Manifesto (sarcasm intended)?

[roeles]

I think showing evidence of your progress is an effective way to plan more realistically (evidence-based) than the wishful thinking I've seen.

The moment estimates are no longer without consequences you get this kind of behavior. I've done it too, in a place where I personally had to be present in a call with the customer to explain why I went 2 hours over the (someone else's) estimate. Your behavior changes after such a call.

The main point I was trying to get across is that team morale appears to be very important for the velocity. You don't get high morale by stuffing too much work into a sprint or making any single story important.

My main objection with Scrum is that people tend to take the rituals as gospel. Which is why I mentioned Agile rather than Scrum.