7 ms·

As someone who is again at a company doing SAFe, I am genuinely curious as to the relevance of story points. For estimation, hours is a good measure, even more

As someone who is again at a company doing SAFe, I am genuinely curious as to the relevance of story points. For estimation, hours is a good measure, even more so when there are external consultants that get paid by the hour. Developer velocity can be measured by tasks/features completed compared to the estimate. Could you elaborate on why story points are useful or perhaps point to some resources on the topic ?

brightball 6y ago
This is a hot button for me also. Story points are a solid measure of complexity, but when it comes to estimates on a planned timeline over the next few weeks I want it in hours or days. Otherwise, somebody ends up trying to convert story points into hours and that's not what it's there to measure. I wrote extensively about this a couple of years ago before I found out about SAFe itself. https://www.brightball.com/articles/reality-driven-development-fixing-project-management-in-software https://www.brightball.com/articles/reality-driven-developme...
chris11 6y ago
I'm not saying it's useful, just that I found out it was a metric for management. I was originally expecting it to be an internal metric. The company I was at actually used it in performance reviews somewhat comparable to stack ranking. There was an expectation that devs complete about 8 points a sprint. I don't know if the eight point target is common, but SAFe does talk about comparing story points across teams. > At scale, it becomes difficult to predict the story point size for larger epics and features when team velocities can vary wildly. To overcome this, SAFe teams initially calibrate a starting story point baseline where one story point is defined roughly the same across all teams. ... > Give every developer-tester on the team eight points for a two-week iteration https://www.scaledagileframework.com/story/ https://www.scaledagileframework.com/story/

brightball 6y ago

This is a hot button for me also. Story points are a solid measure of complexity, but when it comes to estimates on a planned timeline over the next few weeks I want it in hours or days. Otherwise, somebody ends up trying to convert story points into hours and that's not what it's there to measure. I wrote extensively about this a couple of years ago before I found out about SAFe itself. https://www.brightball.com/articles/reality-driven-development-fixing-project-management-in-software https://www.brightball.com/articles/reality-driven-developme...

chris11 6y ago

I'm not saying it's useful, just that I found out it was a metric for management. I was originally expecting it to be an internal metric. The company I was at actually used it in performance reviews somewhat comparable to stack ranking. There was an expectation that devs complete about 8 points a sprint. I don't know if the eight point target is common, but SAFe does talk about comparing story points across teams. > At scale, it becomes difficult to predict the story point size for larger epics and features when team velocities can vary wildly. To overcome this, SAFe teams initially calibrate a starting story point baseline where one story point is defined roughly the same across all teams. ... > Give every developer-tester on the team eight points for a two-week iteration https://www.scaledagileframework.com/story/ https://www.scaledagileframework.com/story/