Why sprint estimation has broken Agile. The only bad thing about this article is that it’s on Medium. The rest is great. I was even going to write my own article on the subject, but someone already did it much better.
We’ve lost the meaning of story points along the way. Bob Martin (one of the people who signed the famous Agile Manifesto) in his talk on Clean Code covers why they introduced the idea of story points. You’re starting a new big project. The business want to do a lot of things but the time is limited and not all of the features are needed for MVC. Would be great to estimate how long each task will take (before we even have the team), so we can better plan and prioritize. So, how to approach it? Uncle Bob suggest to write all features on cards (for example, “implement user registration”), pick one card, and put a number on it. Let’s say, 5. Why 5? IDK, just a good number. And then estimate all other tasks compared to this one. Implementing log-in is faster than registration? Put 3 on it. The PoC of news feed is harder? Put 8. That’s it.
This is why story points aren’t hours. This is why they don’t matter for not deadlined project. This is why the article is good.