Story Points are Pointless — Agile Heretic Episode 13
Story points are used to smash work into two-week sprints. The nature of human psychology makes these into our own weapons of coder-suicide. We will take on work we can’t complete, underestimate risk, rush features that require more thought, and rarely refactor. These numbers communicate wrong and misleading messages to management, whom we later blame for asking “WTF are you people actually doing?”
Common story point dysfunctions include Super Mario points, eternally mandated points, wishful thinking points, peer pressure points, and feature fetish points. (Watch the video for more on these.)
They were an experiment that became canon and they need to be stopped.
Read them all! All the other Agile Heretic videos are right here.
Jim Benson is the creator and co-author of Personal Kanban. His other books include Why Limit WIP, Why Plans Fail, and Beyond Agile. He is a winner of the Shingo Award for Excellence in Lean Thinking and the Brickell Key Award. He teaches online at Modus Institute and consults regularly, helping clients in all verticals create working system. He regularly keynotes Agile and Lean conferences, focusing on the future of work.
