I push back pretty hard on story points whenever I see them. They’re not useful until several iterations in, once you have a baseline for how many points can be

I push back pretty hard on story points whenever I see them. They’re not useful until several iterations in, once you have a baseline for how many points can be delivered in an iteration, and even then one developer’s 1 point story is another’s 5 point. When estimating I tend to use a coarse scale of hours, days, weeks, and (in extreme cases) months. All estimates then get turned into a range between the minimum and maximum the estimate could mean - for example hours becomes 1 hour to 8 hours, days becomes 1 day to 5 days, and so on. Anything estimated as weeks or months probably needs scoping until it can be broken down into tasks that will take between an hour and a week. I find this method works well because it’s intuitive, comes out with a suitable amount of uncertainty relative to the size of the task, and finally results in estimates with units that are useful to project managers and the wider business in scheduling other work needed to get a feature into production.