What is sprint velocity?
Velocity is the amount of work — measured in story points — that a team completes in a single sprint. It's a trailing indicator: it describes what your team has historically delivered, which becomes the foundation for forecasting future sprints.
How is velocity calculated?
Add up the story points of every ticket the team completed in the sprint. That's it. Most teams take a rolling 3-6 sprint average to smooth out the noise of individual sprints (sick leave, surprise outages, etc).
Run the numbers in 30 seconds with our free Sprint Velocity Calculator.
Why velocity matters
- Forecasting — multiplied by remaining sprints, it tells you when the backlog will land.
- Capacity sanity-check — anchors sprint planning to a real number, not optimism.
- Bottleneck signal — sudden velocity drops surface process or team-shape problems early.
Common velocity mistakes
- Comparing teams — story points are relative to the team that estimated them. Team A's 5 ≠ Team B's 5.
- Using it as a target — "raise velocity by 20%" is a recipe for inflated estimates and burnout.
- Reacting to single-sprint dips — single sprints are noisy. Trust the rolling average.