Implementing throughput in your software development team is one of the best ways to keep your project production organized. By collecting data through this metric, your engineering leadership can track team productivity and plan the project’s development before it even starts.
This data also improves communication with your clients. Knowing how long each sprint takes allows you to negotiate delivery dates more effectively without sacrificing code quality.
To help you understand what throughput is and how it can improve your day-to-day work, we’ve put together this guide. Check it out and see why implementing this metric is a game-changer for your company.
What is Throughput?
Also known as the average flow rate, throughput measures your team’s delivery capacity over a set period. In simple terms, it tracks how many tasks or user stories your team can complete within a week or during a sprint—whether it’s weekly, biweekly, or monthly.
This agile metric lets you analyze your tech team’s output based on past project deliveries, helping answer key questions like:
- “For a project with X tasks, how long will my team need to complete it?”
- “How many features can we deliver per sprint?”
- “Is our team delivering at a good pace?”
- “Can we speed up this process even more?”
By monitoring throughput, project leads gain visibility into delivery frequency and the team’s overall capacity. If your team works with user stories of similar size and complexity, you can predict when a feature will be ready with much greater accuracy.
To illustrate this, let’s look at a scenario where a dev team has an inconsistent delivery trend. The number of completed tasks fluctuates heavily between sprints—often due to bugs that push planned work to the next sprint, delaying production. This unpredictability can hurt project timelines and overall efficiency.
Why Throughput Matters for Workflow Management
Your dev team’s output over time directly impacts your workflow efficiency. Having throughput data in hand allows you to estimate deadlines and determine how many features can realistically be developed within a given timeframe.
When used alongside Kanban and WIP (Work in Progress) limits, throughput gives you a clear picture of how long it takes to complete each development item. This insight helps optimize your workflow for faster and smoother delivery. Additionally, analyzing this data can reveal project reliability, production efficiency, and areas where your team struggles the most.
Throughput is also crucial for categorizing Kanban activities. For example, your team may be delivering 10 tasks per week, but if 8 of them are bug fixes, clients won’t see much value in those deliveries. In this case, you need to realign expectations and investigate why so many bugs are happening.
What Can Reduce My Team’s Throughput?
Several factors can drag down your team’s delivery rate, and every tech leader needs to know how to diagnose and fix these issues. The most common blockers include:
- Overly long sprints or iterations
- Frequent scope changes that disrupt planned work
- Critical bugs or system failures that stall progress
- Ignoring Work in Progress (WIP) limits, leading to task overload
Once you identify what’s slowing your team down, you can take action to fix these problems, increase throughput, and boost overall productivity.
Conclusion
In this article, I introduced throughput, an agile metric that helps you track your dev team’s delivery consistency. By leveraging this data, you can answer critical project timeline questions before development even starts since every team has its own delivery patterns.
More importantly, throughput plays a key role in data-driven decision-making for your startup, ensuring that your tech team remains productive and efficient.
Sources: PlataformaTec, LuizaLabs, iMasters
