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What is Throughput?
Completing work urges your team forward and increases momentum. Without knowing how much work your team can complete for a given interval, it’s impossible to evaluate performance and to accurately forecast your future capacity.
We created throughput to help teams more accurately plan and forecast future productivity. It helps teams not only understand their usual capacity, but to align stakeholder expectations concerning how much work can be completed in a given interval.
Throughput is the number of issues completed per interval, and a breakdown of each issue type completed.
Why does Throughput matter?
Throughput provides teams with a clear signal of actual capacity and productivity.
By understanding your team’s capacity and the number of issues completed, your team can plan more accurately, maintain throughput balance and work towards reducing an overload culture by removing items from the interval when deprioritised for new work added mid interval.
What does a 'good' Throughput score look like?
A higher Throughput score is better and is reflective of a more focussed, productive team. A higher score may also be reflective of work being broken down into small batches, which is a hallmark of teams that break down tasks in planning meetings to build a clear understanding of requirements.
How does TeamX measure Throughput?
Throughput is the count of issues completed in the active interval. Issue type throughput is the number of completed tickets of each ticket type. It is presented as a count, where for example a Throughput of 12 issues is higher than a throughput of 2 issues completed.
TeamX surfaces the completed stories, tasks and bugs for each interval, along with the total count. For each issue, TeamX also surfaces the issue completion date, by whom it was completed and if relevant and available, the estimate.
What drives your Throughput?
Activities that contribute to and influence Throughput include the movement of all issues to completion status. Activities that do not contribute to your Throughput are all issues in to-do or in-progress status.
Furthermore your Throughput is influenced by:
Number of interval changes mid-interval
Number of title changes mid-interval
Number of description changes mid-interval
Number of acceptance criteria changes mid-interval
Number of issues in the interval
Number of issues in the interval for each issue_type
Tips for improving your Throughput score.
Set guardrails on the amount of issues you can realistically complete for the interval with work in progress limits.
Refer to your Work In Progress metric in TeamX to focus on work getting done rather than doing more work.
Refer to your Cycle Time metric in TeamX to keep an eye on the speed of tasks being completed, and your Time in Status metric to ensure your issues are moving along at the expected pace; watch out for any blockers
Rank the priority of all issues assigned to the interval during planning so it’s clear which issues can be reprioritised if new and unplanned issues need to be prioritised and assigned
Use your usual throughput count and completion rate to guide how many issues your team can realistically complete within the given interval so you can better manage the expectations of stakeholders, and enlist them to help you re-prioritise if needed.
Keep your team focussed a small number of issues at a time.
If you’ve over-planned your interval, maintain momentum and focus by using your stand-up or check-in sessions to move lower priority items back to the backlog.
Reprioritise your interval load rather than accepting new issues and not removing or reprioritising existing issues.