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Story points are pointless, measure queues

brightball.com

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Re: Story points are pointless, measure queues

#21

Post by robertlagrant »

wewtyflakes wrote: post #16
ozim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Ultimately, we are bound by time, not complexity. Why does it matter how complex a task is? The product managers and customers wont care how hard we as engineers have to think or reason about a problem; to them, the only thing that matters is time until delivery.

Story points aren't useful outside the team. They're for the team to help it figure out roughly how much stuff it can do each sprint. They shouldn't leak out of the team.

Re: Story points are pointless, measure queues

#22

Post by throw310822 »

robertlagrant wrote: post #21
wewtyflakes wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ultimately, we are bound by time, not complexity. Why does it matter how complex a task is? The product managers and customers wont care how hard we as engineers have to think or reason about a problem; to them, the only thing that matters is time until delivery.

Story points aren't useful outside the team. They're for the team to help it figure out roughly how much stuff it can do each sprint. They shouldn't leak out of the team.

A sprint is a unit of time, how does measuring a "complexity"- whatever that is- helps in figuring out how much stuff you can put in *time*?

Re: Story points are pointless, measure queues

#25

Post by xn »

Estimate using time (hours, days, weeks, months, years).

Reflect your uncertainty in your estimates using confidence intervals.

If your confidence intervals are too wide, break down the work and estimate the smaller tasks and/or spend some time doing the work necessary to narrow your confidence intervals.

Re: Story points are pointless, measure queues

#26

Post by psychoslave »

I find the requirement to give a note together is a good insensitive to stay focus on what the topic is, try to grab it, ask questions to start to put some lights on the biggest dark corner of the task.

I couldn't care less about the resulting quantification. What matter is how well we communicate in the team, how helpful we are with each other, how well we can progress and keep motivation where struggle with huge hindrances paving the way. The points are not the point, but they are not pointless.

The map is not the territory. Everyone can have a different map and a different metric system if any. If at the end of the day people inhabiting the territory do it in a satisfying way, all good. It doesn't matter much what the plan on the paper might look like: it will always be a mere epiphenomenal artifact of the actual human processes at play.

Re: Story points are pointless, measure queues

#27

Post by 1xdevnet »

throw310822 wrote: post #14
ozim wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

If they're not time, why use numbers? Use fruits: easy peasy, it's a lemon. A really tough story, a coconut. You can't add them in any case, because they're not time.

I like this, I'd advocate for a fruit-based task system - although I suppose the exact fruit ranking would depend on the team.

- easy peasy: lemon

- easy but needs careful handling: kiwi

- regular but boring: red delicious

- regular, who wouldn't want to take one of these?: mango

- large task, risk of splash damage if mishandled: watermelon

- tough to crack, needs time or a hammer: coconut

- technically we'll do this, but not really our job: tomato

Edit: I am sad that emojis aren't allowed in comments, though it's understandable.

Re: Story points are pointless, measure queues

#28

Post by brightball »

mikeocool wrote: post #13

Given the size of my scroll bar, I rate reading this article a 13. My PM has decided I shouldn't bother reading it, as the likely value isn't worth the effort, because whenever we take on a 13, it ends up dragging on for like 4 sprints, and preventing a lot of other higher value/lower effort stuff from getting done. Maybe at some point in the future, we'll break the article and have a few people on the team each read…

Totally get it. :-)

I did include a helpful TLDR near the beginning with the highlights though.

Re: Story points are pointless, measure queues

#29

Post by freitzkriesler2 »

KothuRoti wrote: post #7

My personal experience with story points is that the number never really mattered, but the process of the team discussing how to rate the complexity of a task was very useful. In terms of having utility of estimating how long something will take, I personally have never been able to translate story points into a reliable indicator for that for many reasons (e.g team changing, domain changing, variability in operation…

Those items after your eg are part of the problem why story points don't work for you.

You really do need to control the amount of time your devs get distracted by other things. If they're solely focusing on that one project, you'll be fine.

Its why i personally appreciate XP more than plain old scrum.

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