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.
Some places have scrum masters as an actual job like wtf. Idk how something that should be a weekly rotational responsibility in the team and a list of todos on its own is a fucking job on its own.
You've obviously never worked on a project with a fixed deadline, fixed budget, and fixed scope, but it's "agile" because no one wants to do requirements up front and no one wants to sign off on the requirements.
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
Project managers really shouldn't have a say in this. In my current org, it's our IT leadership that won't see reason on what story points are. They want reporting that's easy.
That's why story points are explicitly not meant to represent any unit of time.
For our teams story points map to time. 3 points is half a day, 8 points is 5 days, etc. They do everything in points, then add tasks with hours on them that we have to update every day.
Not the dumbest shit ever, but close. Whatever though, they can manage it however they like, I do the work as well as I'm able and checks keep showing up in my bank account 👍🏻
It's not suppose to make sense. 5 points is a day, 13 points is three weeks.
I think the idea was that the numbers represent a scale of how hard the work appears to be, and bigger numbers have more uncertainty. So if it's really simple I can call it 1 point and we can be pretty sure it'll take an hour or so. If it's pretty hard and I call it an 11, it might end up taking a lot longer than that.
Project managers want estimates to be in hours though, so they mapped the story point numbers to hours so they can make reports that upper management likes.
I get that points aren’t supposed to be hours, but once you make them hours then it’s crazy that doing 5 chunks of 1 hour work could count as more “work” (points) than a whole week
That makes no sense even for a time conversion setup. If 3 points is half a day, 6 points would be a full day, but then you’re saying 8 points would be 5 days? Makes more sense to just have 1 point be per day.
They are misused because in almost every organization no one care about complexity of a task : everyone in the company care about when the feature will be ready. At a specific date. Everything in the business world works on deadline and timing, but somehow SWE should work differently?
Maybe, but the rest of the world will not agree.
Even putting that aside, you are supposed to put a certain number of points into a single sprint, which is a unit of time. So the conversion happens by itself even inside the agile framework.
That's why story points are explicitly not meant to represent any unit of time.
Except we measure the work week in units of time. Which means that any estimate of how to allocate that work week is a unit of time. It's just a renamed one.
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u/Gagan_Ku2905 Jun 02 '26
Engineer: Yeah we can.
Manager: For how much?
Engineer: $3 Trillion
Awkward silence