Story points are pointless, measure queues

Story points were only ever an approximate unit of time. To fit them into a clear unit of time such as a sprint is a clear indicator of this. To call them complexity or anything else is misleading- transcribing a dictionary by hand into a CSV file is super simple (1 pt) and takes a long time (how many points is 3 FTE-months in your calibration?).

Eatimating effort-time vs completion time are quite different, serving different stakeholders. A story that takes 1 point of effort by anyone's pointing system could still take a week due to any number of factors (crucial collaborator gets sick, laptop crunched by a car, ransomware attack, whatever). The only really estimable aspect is how long the developer will spend on the work, not when it will be done. Air speed, not ground speed.

That said, it's not clear how queue analysis helps when you haven't spent any time saying how long you might expect each task in the queue to be, or what the dependencies are between tasks within and across teams. Given engaged team members, I've gotten very good results on predicting the pace of progress for sprints, and it all never mattered because everything needed to be shipped. About 4-6 weeks before each X was to be completed we could say with confidence that X would be ready in 4-6 weeks. Not terribly useful.

Story points aren't time (as OP states). They're relative complexity, and uncertainty (hence the fibbonacci sequence building uncertainty in to larger numbers). And stories should be able to sized as big numbers. I've never been on a team comfortable with more than a 7, at least not since my first agile experience where we all took an agile/scrum training together for a few days. We'd frequently give things like 21 or 30 or 50 points, as appropriate. That's the only place I've ever seen a burndown chart that looked like it should. Everywhere else, it's flat until the last day and then drops to zero as all those "it's a 7 I promise" get carried over to the next sprint for the 3rd time.

I'm not sure I agree with the framing of this article.

It seems to be comparing two different things, 1. Points as a method for attributing difficulty to a work item, vs 2. The collaboration process of creating a task list as a method of breaking down work.

Running a team, I found pointing useful, more useful than the individual line engineers did, as we had different goals. My goal, in optimizing the team, was to go through all our work, get everyone in a room and create a relatively optimal plan for the next couple of weeks.

By going through the exercise of pointing, we often found that something one person thought was hard, another found easy. That act of estimating would reveal knowledge one person had that another didn't, that made the task easier. Without that process, the work might have been harder do do, because the easy way was never revealed. We also adhered to a 8 points is too many philosophy that meant any item that hard needed to be decomposed to simple tasks to repoint.

The "queuing" section basically implies the planning process should decompose tasks all the way to nothing but 1 point stories (or at least similarly sized work items within some variance). It's basically the same process as pointing, except not calling out some things are chunkier than others because it all comes out in the wash.

TL;DR this articles definition of queuing is basically pointing where task = 1 point items.

I agree - just countless times I have to beat that up into peoples head and even people who I would consider smart "points time".

After the sprint you can kind of infer the time but it should not be guideline for next estimations unless these are tasks like "fix typos".