Story points are trash, some of the conversation that happens when you are estimating them are useful.

Story points, as it stands today, have become a way for management to micromanage and judge teams performance.

I've heard your thoughts on why not Story Points. I totally agree on the misuse of them and the problems that causes. I'm not convinced that that makes them bad. If people misuse cars, we don't ban the cars, we ban the people or teach them how to drive better. I completely agree that Velocity should not be used as any kind of performance measure. I'm also a supporter of Troy Magennis' work around cycle time for forecasting. My curiosity is on what you do coach teams on for figuring our how much Capacity they have for a Sprint and how much given work will fill that? Unless the team has evolved to a point where all work is roughly the same size, I've found that looking at past velocity is the best way to determine a guide for how much they can take on in the next sprint. As a strictly team level tool to answer the question "How much work can we take on?", I still find Story Points useful. Cheers

I'm glad you came back at the end and said if you're delivering successfully and customers are happy, then keep doing what you're doing. I don't like absolutes. Todd briefly mentioned it, but I think it's really important to call out, ANY metric when used poorly can be dangerous and is bad for teams. Metrics are supposed to be used to generate a conversation. I use story points, I also use cycle time, monte carlo simulations, and many other metrics. I asked my teams if they like using story points or would be happy if we just stopped. They wanted to keep using them. Do I think you're right about not using them, probably. The probably is, if I'm joining a new company and I see they're doing all the normal anti-patterns of using story points. Is it work the 12-18 months to break EVERYBODY from that pattern? No, definitely not, so using these other things is easier, and they're not used to them so they don't have the anti-pattern built in and I can teach them correctly from the start. However, in my case, I've put that work in, everyone is trained up on how to look at the data and what it means and how not to use story points, so am I going to just stop? No, however, I'm introducing these other metrics over time and maybe the story points will phase out, maybe they won't, we'll see what happens. I'm glad you self-corrected the end though, I sure hope I'm not deemed un-hirable because I know how to use story points and know how to create burn ups and velocity charts and use them correctly. Having all the tools in my toolkit should make me more hirable and not less.

I’m in that group and was appalled when I saw this post, but not surprised. I’ve worked in an organization that didn’t weaponize story points, but did weaponize capacity and man hour estimates. Basically, leadership set the standard that each team needed to estimate sub tasks for stories by hour, compared that to capacity (for 6 weeks at a time lol) and used that as an indicator to see if people were working enough or trying to measure it as if the sprint was going to complete. Needless to say, it was very toxic and continued to cause teams to fail.

Wow! I've never heard of an industry standard. I would be torn between: a) asking to see proof of that standard, b) wanting to SM that team to save them, and c) walking out of the interview to save my future sanity.

I agree. Perhaps you can dive a little more into the Flow Based Metrics.

Did I miss the explanation on why they are trash? Assuming they are not weaponized. Or is it the weaponizing that is trash?

We use story points by the lack of a better solution at this moment. Background: we are a small agency (1 team) that effectively means we work as one team on multiple clients/products in each sprint period. At this moment, we use story points to calculate the capacity put into each sprint. The clients pay for x capacity in each sprint period. Personally, I would like to go without the need of story points or hours, but I do not see a solution for the capacity planning per client. Anyone who has a view on how other agencies do this?

Thank you guys! Very helpful

I dont think that Ryan and Todd are labeling people. They are saying their opinion which comes through years of experience and struggle. And also they couldn't be more clear. "If you use story points and you successfully delivering and your customer loves you ignore us" So let's leave it at that. Keep going R&T!

Guys keep ranting ..This has been awesome ..👌🏽👌🏽 Any tips on breaking the ice with the people still living in that SP world ? What would be the best way to get them to see new perspectives on this ? We did a bbl session on flow metrics and people were still a bit uncomfortable to say the least to drop what they know

Story points have made it into the wild where I work. In two places I have worked, the Scrum Masters/Developers came up with sophisticated calculations of what Story Points mean. Isn't there something in the Agile Manifesto about Simplicity? Anway, I have been fortunate that I have been able to hold off of being made to use Story Points even in a Kanban-like setting. Story Points are like tribbles, once they get into the wild, they are everywhere! I suspect some thought I didn't understand Agile since I refused to use Story Points. Ironically, I am the only employee that is learning something about Agile almost daily. If my workplace eventually succeeds in making me use Story Points, I will show them flow metrics alongside of the Story Points.

Don’t think you answered the question . The 55 number probably came from a SAFe formula for new teams. I also think SP are trash , but I do use them or T-shirt sizing to prompt/trigger conversation in refinement

Comparing two teams based on velocity that's makes even more harder

Story points ARE trash. Waste. Having conversations and doing refinement/planning are things that should happen anyway so that teams are aligned and understand the what and the why before coming up with the how. You don't need story points for that. So what if something is X story points or not - if it's something that needs doing first you do it anyway.

I personally would do away with a quantitative approach to story points and use more of a qualitative small, medium or large….. or just do away with points all together. Its gives a very false sense of precision to your ability to predict work!!

Is there any indicator / metric for team to give ‘‘em understanding of item complexity risks and effort? To get back some predictability for stakeholders, O mean to literally say some kind of items are worthless we can’t do them yet .

I've seen team struggle and be successful with story points. My question is if you don't use story points, how do you answer the question when will the product backlog (as it is) be completed? Management loves that question :)

we've tried story points and time estimates and we never managed to deliver 100% of our sprint

So in Jira, Roadmapping is based on velocity. I've seen some pretty good tools that help with future predictability based on Jira roadmaps. Thoughts? Do we just set every story that is well broken down as 3's and let the tools work that way? 1's, 3's, and 8's?

When management starts to talk about velocity I just tell teams to multiple all their story points by 10. So, use 10, 20, 30, 50, 80, etc. Since it's all about relativity the scale still works. And it drives the point home that it's use is for the team only for planning purposes. But, I do agree that MOST teams don't have an understanding of story points and relativity. They're just throwing numbers out.

Poor use of story points is trash. Don't blame the tool, as always.

So you really want to “stop the harmfulness”? Maybe stop labeling people who disagree with your points, and/or point out inconsistencies and gaps in your thinking, as “favorite haters”. Or even the title here: “story points are trash”. Resorting to that sort of name-calling equates to a loud declaration that you can’t engage on the issues themselves.