Agile development methods are overly hyped; probably after cloud!!!.  I happened to read SKORKS today.  I agree with his observation, ie. measuring velocity does not replace planning and scheduling on an agile project.  Velocity is just a metric to measure team productivity.  I would compare this to kloc or design complexity metrics of the traditional development.  One difference is that velocity should always be measured in the team level and so, a constant team is more important.  I heard people talking about shuffling people in a team.  The team velocity is invalid or useless if  team members change constantly in a team.  Once indication of team getting a good grasp of the project is the constantly increasing velocity in the initial phase of the project.  As Alan Skorkin says, a proper estimation process is a must to achieve good and consistent velocity for a team.  More about this later…