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A Tale Of Two Story Points

Dr Stuart Woolley
CodeX
Published in
4 min readAug 13, 2024

It was the best of sprints, it was the worst of sprints.

“Image generated using OpenAI’s DALL·E.”

Imagine for one moment that you’re a competent software engineer, which frankly for some of us is indeed a bit of a stretch most of the time, and you were called upon to give an estimate as to how long a particular task would take to complete.

I’m sure you’re familiar with the situation, and are right now feeling that tenseness in the pit of your stomach, maybe even a few beads of sweat are breaking on your forehead too. Any non-engineering type won’t have a clue what I’m talking about, of course, and neophyte software types will be thinking “oh come on, what’s so difficult about that?”. Poor things.

Surely you’d just quickly calculate in your head what tools you’ll need, what resources would be required, what language and operating system are involved, whether you could re-use anything existing and not unnecessarily reinvent the wheel, maybe even think about what other people are up to and how what you’re doing might interact with their plans, and then, finally just volunteer a number of hours or days?

Of course you would, and that’s because you’re a reasonable human being, a progressive developer who wants to get stuff done, and wants the project you’re working on to succeed. You’re here to do the great work.

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Dr Stuart Woolley
Dr Stuart Woolley

Written by Dr Stuart Woolley

Worries about the future. Way too involved with software. Likes coffee, maths, and . Would prefer to be in academia. SpaceX, X, and Overwatch fan.

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