Comment by Terr_
9 hours ago
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.
To play with the math analogies, imagine a black-box function:
estimate(human_estimator, task_description, world_state) -> numeric_effort
Assume that for various practical reasons, we've decided it's one of the best functions out there. How do we use it effectively, especially when it has noise, and drifts over time with unseen changes to the human_estimator and the hideously complex world_state?
A popular option is to run it multiple times with different person/task combinations, putting a projected number on to each task. Afterwards, the tasks finished in sampling period ("sprint") become a quantifiable total for that period ("velocity").
Do the same process again with the next set of tasks, and you can figure out which ones are likely to fit if the velocity doesn't change much. If you know the velocity will change due to losing staff or vacation days... well, we apply a multiplier and hope for the best.
Trying to "fix" the meaning of points is maladaptive, because they reflect many changing things which are outside our control and can't be independently measured.
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.
> > Problems arise when people try to perma-peg [points to man-hours]
> Upper management [...] only deal in the units of hours
I feel you're mixing up different operations here. You can always express unfinished work as likely to require a certain number of team-sprints, which are convertible to theoretic man-hours. The key is that the conversation rate is only valid for a moment, and technically that moment was the prior sprint.
That's very different from management thinking (or worse, declaring) that points have a permanently fixed proportion to man-hours.
> [...] and dollars
If your management deals in international currency, then perhaps that would be a useful analogy to them: Points and Man-Hours are different sides of FOREX, and they fluctuate based on different conditions.
When Engineering predicts a group of tasks is 54 points, that's like a foreign company signing a long-term contract in €100 EUR instead of USD. You can estimate that you'll receive ~$112 USD in a year, but the actual dollars will likely be different because the exchange-rate will continue changing before that happens.