Your team’s sprint velocity looks great every sprint, but inside, it feels like everything is falling apart. Sprints hit 40 story points like clockwork, yet deadlines slip, bugs pile up, and morale sinks.
Sprint velocity, once a helpful planning tool, has quietly turned into a vanity metric. Here’s how to spot when sprint velocity is lying and how to measure what matters.
Agile teams use the velocity chart in Jira to measure how much work they can complete within a specific time frame. Points are assigned to stories based on effort and complexity, for example:
At the sprint’s end, points for completed tasks are tallied into the sprint velocity. Initially, this was meant to help teams plan capacity and set realistic commitments.
But when it’s treated as the main measure of performance, teams start gaming the system, and it becomes a misleading metric.
When managers only look at the numbers during retrospectives, developers start optimizing for points instead of value, trying to game the system.
When sprint velocity goes up, it can hide real dysfunctions. Watch out for these four common scenarios where the velocity chart in Jira looks great, but performance is worsening:
Velocity stays green, the codebase turns into a minefield.
To hit their target sprint velocity, a developer team starts to skip testing and code configurations. They defer refactoring and stop reviewing in detail, committing buggy code.
The velocity chart in Jira looks like it’s consistent, or even increasing, but the codebase has become a minefield of bugs, digging through 20 different files, and debugging.
Deploying new features becomes slow and risky, frustrating developers and harming long-term productivity. Hitting higher targets isn’t always a good thing, especially when it drives out talent.
Pushing for higher sprint velocity leads to overwork, mistakes, and resignations, leaving the remaining team less willing to take risks.
To keep numbers high, teams avoid complex work, reusing old solutions instead of exploring new ones. The chart looks fine, but growth flatlines, eventually drawing the team’s attention elsewhere.
To hit targets, developers cram unrelated work into a sprint. Agile metrics may improve, but context switching erodes deep work and focus.
That’s why teams need to think of another DevEx metric.
Sprint velocity alone is deceptive because it can’t accurately portray developer experience. Jira plugins can help improve the overall work experience, but they can’t replace good agile rituals.
Managers must measure other DevEx metrics to get a better picture of developer experience
One reliable DevEx metric is the developer satisfaction score. Managers create surveys for engineers and the technical team to gather feedback on how they feel about their tools, rituals, or team dynamics.
When used correctly, it creates a healthy work culture, improves trust among team members, and reflects developer experience better than sprint velocity.
Instead of story points, track how long it takes between when an issue is picked up and when changes are deployed.
This DevEx metric reveals bottlenecks like lengthy code reviews or slow feedback that frustrate engineers and destroy team momentum. Unlike sprint velocity, cycle time can't be gamed and directly measures your team's ability to deliver value.
The lead time for changes is a measure of how long it takes from when a feature is requested or a bug is logged to when it goes live.
A short lead time means you have a responsive team that can adapt quickly to user needs. A long lead time means developers may be overwhelmed, or there might be unnecessary lag slowing down your entire delivery pipeline.
This frequency DevEx metric measures how often a team ships code, patches, or features. It reveals your developers’ confidence and process maturity.
Smaller but more frequent deployments reduce risks because they catch bugs early and provide more motivation because there's visible progress. This is one of the agile metrics that shows whether you are delivering consistent quality.
MTTR measures the time taken to restore service after an incident. It shows whether you have the proper tools, runbooks, and on-call rotations in place. If you do, then developers work confidently instead of dreading the eventual breakdown of production systems.
When this DevEx metric rises, there's a high probability that there are knowledge gaps or poorly documented recovery steps that can paralyze the team.
Combined, these agile metrics provide a more holistic view of team health that sprint velocity simply can’t capture.
The key challenge lies in collecting the data systematically and transforming insights into sustainable improvements, which requires a structured approach and turning feedback into action.
Stop letting misleading agile metrics drive your team into the ground and start gathering honest feedback from your developers. Use retrospectives to gather data, trace root causes, track recurring pain points, and verify whether changes are making things better. You don’t even need to switch tools.
Agile Retrospectives for Jira by Catapult Labs helps you ensure your developers feel heard, turning their experiences into actionable items and creating real change. Make your retrospectives a data-rich source that measures your progress today.