SPRINT COMMITMENT ANALYSIS - DECLINING VELOCITY TREND

ALERT: Declining velocity trend detected

Historical Performance:

• Sprint -4: 35 points
• Sprint -3: 32 points
• Sprint -2: 28 points
• Sprint -1: 24 points

Velocity Metrics:

• Simple average: 29.75 points
• Weighted average (recent weighted more): 27.0 points
• Trend: DECLINING
• Rate of decline: -3.7 points per sprint
• Predicted next sprint (if trend continues): 20-22 points

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CURRENT SELECTION ANALYSIS:

• Proposed stories: 30 points
• Weighted average velocity: 27 points
• Predicted velocity (trend-adjusted): 20-22 points
• Capacity utilization: 136-150%
• Risk level: HIGH to CRITICAL

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

CRITICAL ISSUE: SYSTEMATIC VELOCITY DECLINE

Your team’s velocity has declined 31% over the last 4 sprints (35 → 24).
This indicates a systemic problem.

Common causes of sustained velocity decline:

1. Accumulating technical debt slowing development
2. Growing production support burden
3. Team morale/engagement issues
4. Increasing scope creep mid-sprint
5. Key team member departure or extended absence
6. Growing complexity in aging codebase
7. Inadequate test coverage leading to more bugs

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

RECOMMENDED COMMITMENT:

Given declining trend, recommend CONSERVATIVE commitment:

• Pessimistic (trend-based): 20 points
• Conservative (80% of weighted avg): 22 points ← RECOMMENDED
• Standard (90% of weighted avg): 24 points
• Risky (simple average): 27 points

DO NOT commit to 30 points. Based on trend, team will likely complete
20-24 points.

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

URGENT RECOMMENDATIONS:

1. Schedule Retrospective Immediately:

   • Focus on: “Why is our velocity declining?”
   • Identify root causes, not symptoms
   • Create action items to address systemic issues

2. Investigate These Areas:

   • Technical debt: Is code getting harder to change?
   • Production issues: Are devs pulled into firefighting?
   • Team health: Is morale declining? Burnout indicators?
   • Process issues: Is scope creeping mid-sprint?
   • External factors: New compliance requirements?

3. Don’t Increase Pressure:

   • Declining velocity + increased commitment = burnout
   • Focus on removing obstacles, not adding pressure

4. Consider a Stabilization Sprint:

   • Dedicate next sprint to addressing root causes
   • Technical debt paydown
   • Process improvements
   • Reduced feature commitment

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

FOR THIS SPRINT: Commit to 20-22 points MAX
FOR NEXT RETRO: Investigate velocity decline root cause
FOR LONG-TERM: Address systemic issues before increasing commitment

WARNING: Declining velocity rarely self-corrects without intervention.
Take action now before team health deteriorates further.