I've had great success with velocity tracking. In my experience, once you have a team that's calibrated and humming along nicely, velocity tracking gives you an

I've had great success with velocity tracking. In my experience, once you have a team that's calibrated and humming along nicely, velocity tracking gives you an absolutely spooky ability to predict where the product is going to be two or three months time in the future. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it's far more accurate than any scheduling methodology I've ever used over a long career. I can't speak to why it didn't work for you. But I have seen it fail when an outside managers refused to allow proper calibration. Or when the same outside manager refused to make appropriate schedule or feature tradeoffs. In that particular case, velocity tracking predicted total disaster with 100% accuracy.