But look he’s really agile
Slack DM, three minutes after I pick up an issue.
“You have an issue in the sprint without any story points. Why doesn’t it have any story points? All sprint issues must be pointed.”
Well fuck, Janice, I don’t know. All I’ve done so far is click “Assign to me”. There’s no evaluation yet! I have no idea what the root cause is or how long it will take to fix. Let me cook goddammit.
As someone who works as a software engineer for a smaller company without any of that noise, that sounds like complete hell. I have no clue how devs are getting anything useful done while having to context switch constantly during the day for asinine meetings and corporate progress tracking bullshit.
I literally would not work for a company if they made me do story points.
We do have a scope rule which is intentionally ambiguous, but the idea is a ticket ought not take more than 3 days, and some can be quicker. We expect the average time to meet our velocity and prioritize accordingly. If an effort seems like it will take longer we try to divide it into smaller tickets.
There may be like 5 tickets a year where this doesn’t hold true and we are ok with it. Nothing to be religious about.
The other issue is the amount of points it is totally depends on who does the work! It’s a garbage system to estimate work. Makes people think they have some sort of idea that is more misleading and harmful than just saying “I don’t know exactly but you can expect it to get done promptly because we’ve taken proper steps to analyze and break down the work to be bite sized and delivered consistently.”
“Just give us a point value, we don’t need a time estimate.”
“Okay, so 2 points is roughly equal to 12 hours…”
Ugh we spend so much time trying to assign dumb “points” to stories which totally don’t equate to time but they really do. Nobody knows how long it’s going to take until it’s done! Just prioritize the list and I’ll take the one at the top!
