_niom_

Totally agree. Best way to come over the block is to do something completely different. Give the problem to your unconscious mind and let it do the magic.

Have a long walk, run, shower, sleeping. Read a good book. Do what ever it takes to get your mind out of the code.

I would like to propose something with a hint of Agile:

1. Make all of the work visible by writing out the major thinks to be done (Stories) 2. Split the stories to as small isolated stories as possible. 3. Find stories that have dependencies to other stories. 4. Put Stories in priority order. What story would benefit the project the most? 5. Add tasks to the stories how to complete the story. 6. Call out what stories people in your group are interested. People should voluntarily pick something to do (Self organizing team). 7. Have multiple members working with the same story to get the stories done as fast as possible (Through out put). 8. Make team communication easy (WhatsApp group, facebook group, etc. Pick your favourite tool) 9. Daily or weekly checkpoints, depending on the deadline. (Communication) 10. Agree on what you are going to do before next meeting. (Commitment) 11. Make positive pressure by calling out I completed task X or I completed the story Y when you actually complete it. (Communication) 12. Focus on communication and getting shit done.

Yes agreed. Don't waste your time on that and stay away of that monster. There are far better things to learn like how to create REST APIs and using QueryDSL or JOOQ for databases.

Short answer is no.

Problem with the velocity is that we developers are really poor in estimates and the velocity is rarely accurate enough.

So what I would like to recommend is that you first check your definition of done and then start experimenting with velocity by following how many stories you get done per week. After 4 weeks calculate the average. Each week through out put should be fitted in 1 Standard deviation (Normal distribution). Make it a strict rule that only ready for prod is done done.

This contains a problem that the stories are not equal size but when we experimented with this we used shirt sizes (S, M, L) and made a rule that only S and M size stories (Small enough) where only allowed inside the sprint. Our S was max 2 days and M max 5 days. We got to a point where our through out put was 3 stories per week (Small team: 2 devs + a test expert).