Storypoints are such an artificial concept it doesn’t even make sense. Same thing with estimation though. Most numbers are “I pulled it out me arse” unless the task is a one line change. And even then, shit breaks and it becomes useless, so the one line change is estimated to be a day anyway
The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.
One team might deliver 30 points in a sprint while another delivers 25 and they deliver the same amount of work
Of course management want to be able to use story points for tracking, they want to compare teams using them, so you end up with formulas for how many points to assign
Of course if they score you on points, they get more points, not more work and story points become useless
One time a VP decided to jump in and be a developer and he just pointed a bunch of cards when the dev that was really going to do the work was off for the day. Obviously the points were way too low, so I just padded out the rest of the cards knowing the 7 points on the cards the VP pointed was going to be the entire two week sprint for the other dev and I’d need to to whatever else was put into the sprint.
And that’s how I found out the Product Manager was putting the points into a spreadsheet to track how many points each individual dev was doing. He was actually upset at me for doing 20 points in the sprint. Sure, I padded them out, but why wasn’t he bothered by the cards that had too few points on them? Just upset his spreadsheet was screwed up, but couldn’t be angry at the VP that under-pointed a bunch of cards.
The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.
Yep. But then we got some data and it turned out that story point estimates reliably create a lower quality velocity then simply counting tickets, ignoring their obvious massive size differences.
Any time spent estimating story points, creates negative value.
They worked well for us, we were updating a big system or adding functionality to it and a lot of the features were similar enough that we could reliably break the work down to sub-single sprint chunks and assign consistent story points to them
Though I have only been in one team that lasted more than 3 sprints relatively intact, and it’s only that team that got good at story pointing work
Storypoints are such an artificial concept it doesn’t even make sense. Same thing with estimation though. Most numbers are “I pulled it out me arse” unless the task is a one line change. And even then, shit breaks and it becomes useless, so the one line change is estimated to be a day anyway
The idea with story points is you assign them consistently, so the team’s velocity is meaningful.
One team might deliver 30 points in a sprint while another delivers 25 and they deliver the same amount of work
Of course management want to be able to use story points for tracking, they want to compare teams using them, so you end up with formulas for how many points to assign
Of course if they score you on points, they get more points, not more work and story points become useless
One time a VP decided to jump in and be a developer and he just pointed a bunch of cards when the dev that was really going to do the work was off for the day. Obviously the points were way too low, so I just padded out the rest of the cards knowing the 7 points on the cards the VP pointed was going to be the entire two week sprint for the other dev and I’d need to to whatever else was put into the sprint.
And that’s how I found out the Product Manager was putting the points into a spreadsheet to track how many points each individual dev was doing. He was actually upset at me for doing 20 points in the sprint. Sure, I padded them out, but why wasn’t he bothered by the cards that had too few points on them? Just upset his spreadsheet was screwed up, but couldn’t be angry at the VP that under-pointed a bunch of cards.
Yep. But then we got some data and it turned out that story point estimates reliably create a lower quality velocity then simply counting tickets, ignoring their obvious massive size differences.
Any time spent estimating story points, creates negative value.
Sources:
They worked well for us, we were updating a big system or adding functionality to it and a lot of the features were similar enough that we could reliably break the work down to sub-single sprint chunks and assign consistent story points to them
Though I have only been in one team that lasted more than 3 sprints relatively intact, and it’s only that team that got good at story pointing work