My team has to vote on how many points a story is worth in meetings. At our company, there is officially no definition of what a point constitutes, other than "more points takes longer than less points." I asked in one of these voting meetings, "Can 5 points mean 50 hours to me and 200 hours to someone else?" I was told "Yes". So we are voting for something that officially has no definition or meaning. We are supposed to come to agreement on something that is officially meaningless.
You should never use story points with at least a reference story, and if you aren't able to get a reference story (ie a story similar enough to other stories in your sprint), you shouldn't use story points.
That's probably the weirdest thing about story points and why they are so often a bad mixed with Scrum: Scrum is about discovery while story points is about similarities. No wonder why both often don't work together.
An interesting approach I've seen Jeff Sutherland promotes is to use AI to estimate the work. AI is very good to figure out patterns, so that could be a promising avenue. It still however doesn't prevent the main pitfall pointed out in this article: don't use story points (or any estimation process) to measure the performance of the team, or any output-based measure. The only measure of performance should be the value delivered, and that's only measure through client satisfaction.
My team has to vote on how many points a story is worth in meetings. At our company, there is officially no definition of what a point constitutes, other than "more points takes longer than less points." I asked in one of these voting meetings, "Can 5 points mean 50 hours to me and 200 hours to someone else?" I was told "Yes". So we are voting for something that officially has no definition or meaning. We are supposed to come to agreement on something that is officially meaningless.
You should never use story points with at least a reference story, and if you aren't able to get a reference story (ie a story similar enough to other stories in your sprint), you shouldn't use story points.
That's probably the weirdest thing about story points and why they are so often a bad mixed with Scrum: Scrum is about discovery while story points is about similarities. No wonder why both often don't work together.
An interesting approach I've seen Jeff Sutherland promotes is to use AI to estimate the work. AI is very good to figure out patterns, so that could be a promising avenue. It still however doesn't prevent the main pitfall pointed out in this article: don't use story points (or any estimation process) to measure the performance of the team, or any output-based measure. The only measure of performance should be the value delivered, and that's only measure through client satisfaction.