Team Throughput Issues Week

Team throughput: completed issues per week

Throughput counts how many work items (cards, issues, tickets) a team actually completes in a given stretch of time. The math is about as plain as it gets: throughput = issues_done / time_window. Close 48 issues over 4 weeks and that's 12 issues/week. Where velocity adds up story points and only means something inside one team, throughput counts whole items, which makes it something you can line up across different teams and tools.

It sits among the four flow metrics that Daniel Vacanti (who wrote Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability) brought into the mainstream, the others being cycle time, WIP and work item age. Pour your historical throughput into a Monte Carlo simulation and out come probabilistic forecasts, the kind that say "85% chance of finishing 30 items in 6 weeks." Those are a lot more honest than betting everything on a single number.

Applications

Sprint planning (how many items can we honestly take on?), release forecasting through Monte Carlo, continuous improvement tracking once you've changed something in the process, and capacity planning spread across squads. Tools such as ActionableAgile, Jira Advanced Roadmaps and Nave will chart throughput for you with no manual work.

FAQ

Throughput or velocity, which should I use? Throughput. It sidesteps the gaming and point inflation that story points invite, and it still works when a team doesn't estimate at all.

Why measure per week and not per sprint? Weekly samples hand you more data points to feed Monte Carlo, and they expose cadence patterns within the week (how Mondays compare to Fridays, that sort of thing).

Should I normalise by item size? No. That's rather the point of the metric. Cut work into items of roughly the same size and let the raw count do the talking. When sizes swing wildly, take it as a hint to split your stories down further.