4 ms·

In theory. In practice, - stories are not always the same "size", - someone correlates story points to a time unit, - everyone estimates stories differently

In theory. In practice, - stories are not always the same "size", - someone correlates story points to a time unit, - everyone estimates stories differently, - not everyone understands how to do the thing because they've never done the thing, - everyone understands complexity differently, - people makes estimates to what they think everyone else will say, - no one ever goes back and updates an estimate, - the estimates are never used as data in the future, - there are never enough estimates to create a reasonable model that gives predictability better than a hand-waving human, - no one's really invested in the estimates they are giving., because no one really cares that much except for whoever "needs" the estimate, - estimating meetings are incredibly boring and a waste of time, - they give everyone a false sense of certainty I'll stop there...

pas 7y ago
It's not a problem if sizes are different. That's why they are scored. Points are only mean something with a constant team anyway. No point in comparing between different companies, teams, projects. Also, you can estimate time based on points. After you have some baseline velocity for the given team-project setup. ... I don't know what kind of estimation meetings you had to suffer through, but the ones we did were the usual SCRUM poker, and then the PM tool just gives you the estimate based on the team's past velocity. No hand-waving. It's data driven. And anyone has any problem with the date can talk to the PM and decide which features to cut/change.
- XorNot 7y ago
  Mine have always had no forewarning, no list of items we'll be potentially estimating (so I could, for example, inspect the codebase and see how much work a 1-line description might be hiding) and then immediately afterwards someone more senior usually rides in and throws a bunch more items at the wall.
  - pas 7y ago
    That seems like a perfect recipe for disaster. We had those, and simply started to say no, that's bullshit. Eventually reality won :)

pas 7y ago

It's not a problem if sizes are different. That's why they are scored. Points are only mean something with a constant team anyway. No point in comparing between different companies, teams, projects. Also, you can estimate time based on points. After you have some baseline velocity for the given team-project setup. ... I don't know what kind of estimation meetings you had to suffer through, but the ones we did were the usual SCRUM poker, and then the PM tool just gives you the estimate based on the team's past velocity. No hand-waving. It's data driven. And anyone has any problem with the date can talk to the PM and decide which features to cut/change.

XorNot 7y ago
Mine have always had no forewarning, no list of items we'll be potentially estimating (so I could, for example, inspect the codebase and see how much work a 1-line description might be hiding) and then immediately afterwards someone more senior usually rides in and throws a bunch more items at the wall.
- pas 7y ago
  That seems like a perfect recipe for disaster. We had those, and simply started to say no, that's bullshit. Eventually reality won :)