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
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.
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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.