What counts as Velocity?
Recently we encountered a large-enough issue that required a postmortem (like a retro). One of the teams involved asked if they should put that into the sprint and give it points (ie. size it). This reminded me of a debate we encountered in our earliest days of implementing Agile. One side insists that we only point planned stories that provide immediate, direct business value to the company. Therefore, things like defects, chores, and meetings should not get points assigned. The reasoning here is that these activities are typically not included because they may occur without consistency and predictability across iterations;…