What this screen is for
Velocity compares sprints with one another. It charts how much work each of the last several sprints completed and reports the average across them. You choose a project and how many recent sprints to include, from five up to twenty.
Unlike a burndown, which looks inside one sprint, velocity is only meaningful across a run of them: a single sprint's number says little, while a stable average over several is a reasonable basis for planning.
When to use it
Use it in sprint planning to sanity-check how much work to commit to, and over time to see whether a team is speeding up, slowing down or simply inconsistent.
What you see on this screen
- The horizontal axis is one group per sprint, named, running oldest on the left to most recent on the right.
- The vertical axis is Tasks — a count of work items, not story points.
- Completed Tasks is the blue bar: how many of that sprint's items finished.
- Total Tasks is the grey bar beside it: everything the sprint held. The gap between the two is the work that did not finish.
- Average Velocity is the flat red dashed line across the chart: the mean of the completed figures for the sprints shown. It moves as you change how many sprints are included, so it describes this selection rather than the team for all time.
One figure sits above the chart: the average tasks completed per sprint.
Filters and actions
Pick a project, then how many recent sprints to include — Last 5, Last 10, Last 15 or Last 20, starting at ten. There is no export or print.
A rising set of blue bars means the team is getting through more; bars that swing about mean the average is a weak basis for planning, and the reason is usually visible in how far the grey bars sit above the blue ones.
Related
- Sprint Burndown — remaining work inside one sprint
- Sprint Report — the detail of a single sprint's outcome