Obsessing over ticket velocity misses the point, but benchmarks may exist.
Why Tickets/Week Isn’t Everything
Raw count is misleading:
- 20 trivial bugs ≠ 3 complex tasks
- Story points matter more than ticket count (baseline: 5-10 pts/engineer per 2-week sprint)
- True throughput = completed tickets/week with quality + reasonable cycle time
Reality check: 1 ticket/day (5/week) is a sustainable pace; spikes to 10+ during bug triage weeks are normal but unsustainable.
DevOps-specific: Infrastructure tickets may take longer especially if there is more than one team involved in decision making.
What Drives Higher Throughput
1. Ticket Sizing (The Goldilocks Rule)
Too Big (>1 week): Split → Epic → Stories → Tasks
Too Small (<4 hours): Batch into 1-day tickets
Just Right: 1-3 days each → 2-5/week sustainable
Teams breaking work into 1-day tasks can hit 25 tickets/week/team.
2. Workflow Hygiene
- WIP limit: Keep “In Progress” <5 tickets
- Cycle time: Target <7 days per ticket
- Automation: CI/lint/tests cut review time by 50%
3. Context Switching Tax
Juggling 3+ tickets/day wastes 40% of productivity. Focus deeply on 1-2 at a time.
Red Flags vs. Green Flags
Red Flags
Low velocity (<3/week):
- Oversized tickets (not broken down)
- Blocked >3 days consistently
- Poor estimation skills
High but fragile (>12/week):
- Bug-only work (tech debt accumulating)
- Skipping tests/reviews
- Burnout risk
Green Flags
5-8 quality tickets/week + deploy frequency >weekly + low rework rate = healthy velocity.
Jira Native Metrics
- Velocity Chart: Average completed points/week
- Control Chart: Cycle time trends
- Burndown: Sprint commitment tracking
The Bottom Line
Good engineers optimize for impactful velocity (deployed value/week), not raw ticket count.
What matters more:
- Are you shipping features or just closing tickets?
- Is your cycle time improving?
- Are you reducing blockers quarter over quarter?
Focus on sustainable throughput with quality—not vanity metrics.
I took a look on scrum.org to elaborate my thoughts on this : https://www.scrum.org/scrum-kanban
https://www.scrum.org/forum/scrum-forum/31862/story-points-complexity-vs-effort
