It’s not the tool, it’s how you use/abuse it
A few days ago I posted the following article:
“Scrum — Management tells us to use story points”
Are you serious? — episode 19medium.com
My aim with this article was to point out that Scrum doesn’t prescribe story points. On top of that I wanted to clarify that story points are often used for other purposes (standardization, time tracking, measuring team performance, comparing teams) and that this has implications, that this isn’t as straight-forward as it may seem.
I agree with how Paddy Corry puts it: “Maybe there are contexts where they work well, but we also need to be open to the idea that something else could work better! I am against any prescriptive approach that precludes opportunities for a team to ‘uncover better ways’ through experimentation. Story Points are an example of how a technique can become ‘weaponised agile’, demanded by management but lacking a fundamental understanding of the principles and values of the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, or the values of Scrum. Unfortunately, this isn’t restricted to Story Points”.
I am not anti-story points.
I believe story points have their place. Many teams have effectively estimated and planned with story points. There is no harm with story points when they stay within the team.
But even when story points leave the team this doesn’t have to be a bad thing when the answer to the two questions below is ‘yes’:
Do the stakeholders understand story points?
Do stakeholders respond to deviations in a supportive way?
The way stakeholders respond to deviations on the velocity charts and predictability charts is a litmus-test for your organization. When an organization supports (Scrum) teams by pinpointing potential issues and helping them to improve, then that’s only good. This only helps everyone.
Do I think story points are perfect? Certainly not. Do I believe that there are other practices that might be working just as well or even better in certain domains? Of course!
But I don’t hate story points.
Did you like the article? Then it would be awesome if you’d clap 👏🏻. I am also very keen to learn what you think about this topic.
My twitter profile is https://twitter.com/WJAgeling
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