Escape Velocity - Better Metrics for Software Teams
summary
Argues that velocity is nearly useless as a metric and shows concrete alternatives: measure cyclomatic complexity to track technical debt, count escaped defects as a percentage of throughput, track release frequency and coupling to infer batch size, and use cumulative flow diagrams to spot bottlenecks. Demonstrates a Monte Carlo forecast (using Focused Objective tooling) with split‑rate ~25% and example probabilities ranging ~35%–90% for a delivery date, and cites ~20% compounded context‑switching cost per concurrent task.
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chapters (15)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:26DOC NORTON
- 0:43ESCAPE VELOCITY
- 3:39WHAT IS VELOCITY?
- 8:17HOW MIGHT
- 13:56VARIABLE VELOCITY
- 17:50CODE COMPLEXITY
- 21:03THROUGHPUT (VELOCITY)
- 24:45HIGH COUPLING
- 25:18REDUCED COUPLING
- 26:14LIMIT WORK IN PROGRESS
- 26:44LIMIT YOUR WORK IN PROGRESS
- 29:32CUMULATIVE FLOW DIAGRAM
- 34:14FORECASTING
- 37:09FOCUSED OBJECTIVE
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