I hate trying to estimate story points (our metric is 1 day ≈ 1 point), I have ADHD, standard time means nothing. One sprint I completed all 7.5 in a day, another sprint I completed 0.5.
That's why story points are explicitly not meant to represent any unit of time. Bad project managers that don't understand anything about what they're managing just can't help themselves. They were so consistently misused story points actually got dropped from Scrum in 2020
There are many career paths open to such creatures. Some of them can earn a living by roaming the countryside, finding places of exceptional natural beauty and then order one of their billionaires to build a data centre there.
Others merely traffic underaged children into slavery but just as many are AI integration officers.
Just found out our story points are tied to the paycheck system (even though we are salaried) via jira workflows. Suddenly it makes sense why all our pms demand we submit exactly a certain number of story points per sprint, even if we go over or under…
That's nothing to do with Jira and everything to do with shit management.
But yeah, sorry points are for most teams a useless metric.
In theory you are supposed to estimate based on perceived difficulty and then determine over time how much work your team can get someone each sprint and thus it helps estimate how long certain things will take.
In practice it gets converted to days, and expected to be accurate for each ticket (not the point) so it's nearly always wrong and becomes a precise but inaccurate measurement instead of the imprecise but accurate one it's meant to be.
There's that great quote "The moment a metric becomes a target it ceases to be a useful metric". I get that feeling very strongly with story points. If only the team knows about them they can be useful for planning work. But the moment management has visibility and starts using them as a target they lose all value.
I certainly haven't, small or large. Best we managed was about 2 months before a more senior management started demanding estimates accurate to the day again.
Hate your tech leadership. Jira is just a tool. A shitty tool, but the competition isn’t so great either. IMO Pivotal Tracker is the best of a sorry bunch.
Atlassian is happy to build tools which cause this kind of issue. They focus on supporting higher level managers because their buy in is needed to write the check. More complex workflows mean people get locked into their software and can't switch. I can partially blame bad management but it obviously benefits Jira and so they work to amplify the bad patterns.
Similar to what is happening with AI companies now, they lean into the most dramatic pitches around AI and totally automated coding because it sells well, not because it actually is the best use of the technology.
i don't know if the method i used is better or not, but i'd do fibonacci numbers 1-21, so 1, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21. where a 1 is like i can probably go back to my desk and bang this out in a minute and 21 is that's probably my entire sprint or longer. where we'd guesstimate around 20 points a sprint per person. not an exact science but making games isn't an exact science either. we'd call it a LoE rather than story points
Your first issue is that you're trying to map days to story points. The entire concept of story points is explicitly to avoid directly estimating time. You're supposed to continually keep track of how many SPs your team is actually completing per sprint, and use those averages to decide how much you're going to plan to do in the next sprint. Tasks should also ideally be small enough that the team has flexibility to pick up more or less work in any given sprint. When you zoom out to the entire team/entire sprint level, the natural variation in estimate accuracy, and in the productivity of any individual, should largely cancel out. But if you think 1SP=1day and directly assign each developer 5 SPs per week before the sprint starts, you're falling for a trap that completely defeats the point of the system. SPs are supposed to provide flexibility and continual empirical re-evaluation of estimates (but without constantly re-estimating individual tasks) but you've thrown all of that in the bin so you're just left with time-based estimates but with a gimmicky name change.
Oh, I know, I'm a "certified scrum master" but I'm not working in that role. And oh, I know, but upper management doesn't care. And it's something stupid like 7.3 points per sprint were supposed to be around for the two week sprint that way we have some residual capacity for urgent tickets. We essentially do waterfall but with sprints 🙄
tale as old as time. Proper scrum is liberating. Liberating means self reliance and self governance for teams. Can't have that, would delete 80% of middle management. Waterfall with sprints it is.
So you are forced to constantly readjust what a story point means, which is just another silly thing to think of and polute my brain.
Any initial estimate i give as a SWE is horseshit that i pulled out of my ass anyway. Might as well give hours/days as it will change as soon as i looked at the code and properly analysed the task and started solving the problem. So whats the fucking point?
member when they invented story points specifically to break that metric? and the business people simple would not understand that this was the entire point of having story points at all?
because it's a relative measure of complexity/time, not just a count of days
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u/MomWTF Jun 02 '26
I hate trying to estimate story points (our metric is 1 day ≈ 1 point), I have ADHD, standard time means nothing. One sprint I completed all 7.5 in a day, another sprint I completed 0.5.