Let's Talk About "Velocity Drag."

The buzzword of the decade in software development is “Velocity.” Velocity is the pace at which work gets done. It tells development managers and stakeholders how productive the development team is and how many new features can be expected in any release.

When development teams start a project they are in "High Velocity" mode.

The beginning of a project feels great. Everyone is optimistic, significant progress is made regularly, and there is a great sense of teamwork and collaboration. Lots of features are produced and released into production.

But once a product gets released, development progress (or velocity) begins to slow.

Once you release software out into the wild, users begin interacting with the software in ways the developers never intended or anticipated. Bugs and issues emerge, and precious development time is consumed by troubleshooting, repair, and maintenance. Clients start complaining about unresolved issues. Without relief, the developers have to work overtime to stay on schedule developing new features while fixing the defects in the released code.

The project owner, investors, and executives still want to see progress on the ever-increasing backlog of new features, but developers are bogged down with fixing and testing production defects.

Soon, the constant shifting priorities and multitasking mean developers never feel safe to focus on one thing. This is called “velocity drag.”  Velocity drag is not only costly to the organization, but demoralizing for programmers.

Left unchecked, Velocity Drag can result in a Death March project where there is constant re-work, schedules are unrealistic, everything is sub-optimized, and there is growing discouragement, anxiety, and cynicism. No one is doing what they are best at. The once optimistic team is now in-fighting, passing blame, and updating their resumes.

The Velocity Drag Timeline

Contributors to Velocity Drag

Stonemill Keeps Your Developers
Running at Full Speed!

Our job is to find as many defects as possible prior to release so that after release your developers can focus on new features instead of fixing current ones. At Stonemill Consulting, independent software testing is all we do.  And we are good at it. We hire top people with technical backgrounds and years of experience who love to test. 

So, whatever testing need you have, we can help.  Whether it is help with test execution, implementing best practices, or a complete Software Quality Assurance (SQA) managed services approach. Our flexible model means you can keep your productivity high and overhead low. 

We Eliminate Velocity Drag

Ask Yourself...

• Are your customers finding defects for you?

• Do you run out of time before you have to release?

• Are you skipping tests because you don’t have time?

• Do you often release without a full regression test?

• Would you lose business if your site went down?

• Are you suffering an existential crisis and wondering why you ever got into development in the first place?

If you find yourself saying "yes," or silently crying to yourself, contact Stonemill Consulting.