Comment by wonderwonder
2 years ago
OP here. You are right, but the minimum point totals eliminates any benefits that can be achieved from scrum, it forces engineers to incentivize survival over project momentum. If a story is really a 3 pointer but I know that if I close 2 3 point stories in a week then I am pipped, suddenly those 3 point stories are 5 point stories.
On the teams that played fair, it was a mix of sr. and jr. and the sr. measuring that story at a 3 meant the jr. was working the weekend. Over and over again.
Note: On the happy team, we had almost no supervision, not even a scrum master. We just looked out for each other. That 3 point story often suddenly became an 8 as the end of the week approached and no one blinked. That team incidentally was the only one that consistently got good reviews from management.
> teams that played fair
What does "played fair" mean? Did this organsiation have a fixed definition of the value of a story point?
EDIT: The reason I ask is because when story points are used "correctly" their value is defined entirely relative to the previous output of the team which produced the estimate. Like, their purpose is to allow dev teams to do relative estimation (which is pretty easy to do), but also enable someone to produce absolute estimates based on the team's track record of delivery. Team says a story is a 5 pointer? Query previously delivered stories which the team also said were 5 points and if there's enough data you'll be able to forecast with reasonable certainty how long it will take them to deliver this new story. Used this way there's no "fair" value of a story point - it doesn't matter if one team uses point values in the range 0 - 1 while another uses point values in the range 1,000 - 1,000,000.
The whole thing breaks if you start comparing point values across teams, or say that 1 point is 1 day's work or whatever.