In the way we work at Pivotal, feature stories "earn" velocity, but bugs do not. So if attention is not paid to code quality, velocity will eventually trend downwards.
This is intentional, as it gives you a feedback loop on quality and helps to improve predictions of actual feature progress.
From there you can invert to points/cost per engineer/week.
Of interest, our average points per engineer per week on Cloud Foundry has remained largely steady over time and scale. I'm wary of that metric because it breaks a fundamental concept of measuring velocity (that points are only meaningful inside a single project).
This is intentional, as it gives you a feedback loop on quality and helps to improve predictions of actual feature progress.
From there you can invert to points/cost per engineer/week.
Of interest, our average points per engineer per week on Cloud Foundry has remained largely steady over time and scale. I'm wary of that metric because it breaks a fundamental concept of measuring velocity (that points are only meaningful inside a single project).