Comment by muzani

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.