All of this has been said before ad inifinitum, but I want to put my own spin on it so here we go.

Many naive ways of calculating and viewing velocity are bullshit.

If you are going to measure it, you should measure all of it, including tech debt

The root question is- why do you want to know “velocity”? Usually so people who aren’t engineers want a framework they can use to think about how much stuff eng gets done, and when the stuff they care about will get done- like looking at a river and seeing that it flows or is stagnant.