Comment by crazygringo
1 month ago
> I've never met someone for whom points didn't eventually turn into a measurement of time
The goal isn't to avoid time estimation completely, that would be crazy. People estimate how many points get delivered per sprint and sprints have fixed lengths of time. You can do the math, you're supposed to.
The point is that points avoid a false sense of precision: https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/estimatio...
If it works for you, then it's a good method, but in my opinion the most transparent way to avoid a false sense of precision for time estimation (as with all else) is by explicitly including error bars, rather than changing the units-of-measure.
Error bars are complicated, and who's to say how large they should be? It winds up being a lot of pointless arguing over arbitrary precision.
The Fibonnaci sequence of point values has wound up just being a lot simpler for most people, as it encapsulates both size and error, since error tends to grow proportionally with size.
I.e. nobody is arguing over whether it's 10h +/- 1h, versus 12h +/- 1h, versus 12h +/- 2h, versus 11h +/- 3h. It's all just 5 points, or else 8 points, or else 13 points. It avoids discussion over any more precision than is actually reliably meaningful.
I worked on a product that was built around planning an estimation with ranged estimates (2-4h, 1-3d, etc)
2-12d conveys a very different story than 6-8d. Are the ranges precise? Nope, but they're useful in conveying uncertainty, which is something that gets dropped in any system that collapses estimates to a single point.
That said, people tend to just collapse ranges, so I guess we all lose in the end.
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> The process is quite easy to implement
Having implemented it myself, I agree it is easy to implement. My argument is that it is overly difficult to maintain. My experience is that incentives to corrupt the point system are too high for organizations to resist.
Funnily enough - I work closely with a former director of engineering at Atlassian (the company whose guide you cite) and he is of the opinion that pointing had become "utterly dishonest and a complete waste of time". I respect that opinion.
If you have citations on pointing being effective I'd be very interested. I consider myself reasonably up to date on SWE productivity literature and am not aware of any evidence to that point - I have yet to see it.
I guess my experiences are quite the opposite. Maintaining the process couldn't be easier. I don't even know what it means to "corrupt" points...? Or for points to become "dishonest"? I'm genuinely baffled.
I'm not aware of any citations, just like I'm not aware of any citations for most common development practices. It seems to be justified more in a practical sense -- as a team or business, you try it out, and see if it improves productivity and planning. If so, you keep it. I've worked at several places that adopted it, to huge success, solving a number of problems. I've never once seen a place choose to stop it, or find something that worked better. If you have a citation that there is something that works better than points estimation, then please share!
It's just wisdom of the crowds, or two heads are better than one. Involving more people in making estimates, avoiding false precision, and surfacing disagreement -- how is that not going to result in higher-quality estimates?
By "dishonest" I'm saying they become measurements of time, which is what we were trying to avoid.
Stepping back - my experience is that points are solving a problem good organizations don't have.
The practice I see work well is that a senior person comes up with a high level plan fror a project with confidence intervals on timeline and quality and has it sanity checked by peers. Stakeholders understand the timeline and scope to be an evolving conversation that we iterate on week-by-week. Our rough estimates are enough to see when the project is truly off-track and we can have a discussion about timelines and resourcing.
I just don't see what points do for me other than attempt to "measure velocity". In principle there's a metric that's useful for upper management, but the moment they treat it as a target engineers juice their numbers.
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