And don't forget to extrapolate how much more could be achieved, if you just hired some new programmers or cloned the existing ones. That's the real magic...
By using story points, agile teams with developers who work at different speeds can agree on estimates. A senior developer might be able to knock out a certain product backlog item in 8 hours, and a more junior developer might take 16 hours to do the same work, but they can both agree that it’s a 1-point story. If we turn stories into effort in hours, this agreement will be impossible.
If a senior developer and a junior developer can both agree that a task is "1 point" despite the senior taking 8 hours and the junior taking 16 hours, then the story point itself doesn't have a consistent meaning. In this scenario:
For the senior developer, 1 point = 8 hours
For the junior developer, 1 point = 16 hours
This means story points still represent different amounts of actual effort for different team members. So the "agreement" being described is somewhat illusory - they're using the same label (1 point) to describe fundamentally different amounts of work time.
This suggests that hour-based estimates can't achieve consensus. But if the team can agree that a task is "1 point" despite it representing different work durations for different people, they could just as easily agree it's an "8-16 hour task" or a "medium effort task" using different terminology.
Rather than providing value, story points create an unnecessary abstraction that obscures practical planning. The claimed "shared understanding" is illusory, as team members still implicitly convert points to their personal time estimates.
When we say a task is "3 points," what we're really saying is "this takes about X hours for me, but Y hours for you." By avoiding explicit time discussions, teams miss opportunities for crucial conversations about skill gaps, knowledge sharing, and realistic scheduling. The focus on "relative complexity" without anchoring to time prevents teams from improving their actual estimation abilities.
Worse, this abstraction complicates communication with stakeholders who reasonably expect timeframes, not point values. The translation between points and delivery dates happens anyway—just with less transparency and more potential for misalignment.
Story points don't solve the core challenge of estimation uncertainty; they simply mask it behind a layer of abstraction that creates an illusion of measurement precision without delivering practical planning benefits.
And don't forget to extrapolate how much more could be achieved, if you just hired some new programmers or cloned the existing ones. That's the real magic...
well in my org they straight forward made 1 SP = 4 hours (effective hours)
By using story points, agile teams with developers who work at different speeds can agree on estimates. A senior developer might be able to knock out a certain product backlog item in 8 hours, and a more junior developer might take 16 hours to do the same work, but they can both agree that it’s a 1-point story. If we turn stories into effort in hours, this agreement will be impossible.
If a senior developer and a junior developer can both agree that a task is "1 point" despite the senior taking 8 hours and the junior taking 16 hours, then the story point itself doesn't have a consistent meaning. In this scenario:
For the senior developer, 1 point = 8 hours
For the junior developer, 1 point = 16 hours
This means story points still represent different amounts of actual effort for different team members. So the "agreement" being described is somewhat illusory - they're using the same label (1 point) to describe fundamentally different amounts of work time.
This suggests that hour-based estimates can't achieve consensus. But if the team can agree that a task is "1 point" despite it representing different work durations for different people, they could just as easily agree it's an "8-16 hour task" or a "medium effort task" using different terminology.
Rather than providing value, story points create an unnecessary abstraction that obscures practical planning. The claimed "shared understanding" is illusory, as team members still implicitly convert points to their personal time estimates.
When we say a task is "3 points," what we're really saying is "this takes about X hours for me, but Y hours for you." By avoiding explicit time discussions, teams miss opportunities for crucial conversations about skill gaps, knowledge sharing, and realistic scheduling. The focus on "relative complexity" without anchoring to time prevents teams from improving their actual estimation abilities.
Worse, this abstraction complicates communication with stakeholders who reasonably expect timeframes, not point values. The translation between points and delivery dates happens anyway—just with less transparency and more potential for misalignment.
Story points don't solve the core challenge of estimation uncertainty; they simply mask it behind a layer of abstraction that creates an illusion of measurement precision without delivering practical planning benefits.