Comment by matt_s
3 days ago
JIRA gets a lot of deserved hate but I think nearly all software work tracking systems suffer from the same issue: marketing over promises about velocity and predictions about project delivery timelines.
Have we as an industry gotten any better at delivering projects on time? If you have a lot of dysfunction in your organization no software is going to fix that. Or to put it another way, you can’t solve people problems with software.
The whole story point thing seems like a scam where some invented currency is used to trick people into not seeing reality.
I’ve never worked on a team where any nontrivial task could be done by any two people in roughly the same amount of time.
Experience, skill, subject area familiarity — everyone is different.
It is utter madness to estimate sprints before assigning the work!
We just stopped using story points when nobody could agree on them. I used emojis as story points once. A colleague asked wtf the :D meant vs :/ or :( or :').
I said I had no idea. I just put how I felt. Some things looked simple but gave me a bad feeling; the bad feeling was always mostly justified.
Every day I'd add up all the emojis for the day, which adds up to ~8 hours. After a week, we add them up again for ~40 hours. Eventually we got a pretty decent estimate that :) meant half an hour and the vomiting one would be at least 3 days.
Some emojis like the grimacing were an indicator that we needed to run a spike on this - it just wasn't groomed enough. Some are an indicator that we didn't trust the other person expected to handle this.
Everyone has different emojis just as they have different emotions about the same task. One person may like refactoring, another may be better at UI.
None are entirely accurate but such is the nature of software. Story points are misleading because they are precise but inaccurate.
Right. We're optimizing for the wrong metrics. Hours spent arguing if something is a 3 or 5 story points could've been spent just building it.
The obsession with predictability in an unpredictable process is the real problem, especially in copilot and cursor era. :D
It's used to justify jobs of scrum/pm people and I'm tired of being polite about it. Imagine we enter a tech company, decide it's LARPing time, and create DnD rules for a completely made up role and then pay someone to do it. That is literally what has been happening in the tech industry.
If people are arguing between 3 and 5 points just pick one and move on.
If people are arguing between 3 and 21 points there's a mismatch in understanding what the work entails.
Often the highest is the correct answer. If it's 21, then break it down until nobody thinks it's 21.
Jira is also just terribly built