Attempting a serious but not-a-certified-whatever answer: "Points" do have meaning when properly used as a kind of moving-average tool for forecasting within a particular context.
Problems arise when people try to perma-peg them to particular tasks, or (worse) man-hours or (much worse) man-hours across teams. Even just encouraging the humans to answer in terms of hours/days taints the accuracy of the forecast by introducing a kind of bias.
So, what you do is you recognize every ticket has a somewhat variable “actual effort”; and, if you’ve been honest in approximate effort pointing, you’ll know your team (or your own) velocity.
From there you can run Monte Carlo simulations - say a few hundred thousand, and get a pretty good estimate of actual time spent.
My wife, despite loving all things French, just doesn't "do metric". She wants my height in feet and inches, my weight in pounds, boom done. So while I know my mass in kilograms, she needs the conversion done before she can even begin to have a reference point.
Upper management is the same way. They have forecasts that they need to make, deadlines and budget goals that they need to hit. They only deal in the units of hours and dollars (or local currency). Every software engineer is accountable for their work in those units only. The conversion needs to be done before the management chain has a reference point.
One easy way to do this is to have each engineer estimate the time it takes to fulfill a story after it's been pointed; then, upon completion, record their actual hours spent. Their estimated vs. actuals tend to stabilize over time, so even if they misestimate a task, you can arrive at a good guess at the time it will actually take.
Attempting a serious but not-a-certified-whatever answer: "Points" do have meaning when properly used as a kind of moving-average tool for forecasting within a particular context.
Problems arise when people try to perma-peg them to particular tasks, or (worse) man-hours or (much worse) man-hours across teams. Even just encouraging the humans to answer in terms of hours/days taints the accuracy of the forecast by introducing a kind of bias.
For forecasting what, if not man-hours?
Effort. Which is a very nebulous term, I agree.
So, what you do is you recognize every ticket has a somewhat variable “actual effort”; and, if you’ve been honest in approximate effort pointing, you’ll know your team (or your own) velocity.
From there you can run Monte Carlo simulations - say a few hundred thousand, and get a pretty good estimate of actual time spent.
I’ve seen it work before with shocking accuracy.
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Sorry.
My wife, despite loving all things French, just doesn't "do metric". She wants my height in feet and inches, my weight in pounds, boom done. So while I know my mass in kilograms, she needs the conversion done before she can even begin to have a reference point.
Upper management is the same way. They have forecasts that they need to make, deadlines and budget goals that they need to hit. They only deal in the units of hours and dollars (or local currency). Every software engineer is accountable for their work in those units only. The conversion needs to be done before the management chain has a reference point.
One easy way to do this is to have each engineer estimate the time it takes to fulfill a story after it's been pointed; then, upon completion, record their actual hours spent. Their estimated vs. actuals tend to stabilize over time, so even if they misestimate a task, you can arrive at a good guess at the time it will actually take.