Last week I wrote, "Story Points are not uncontroversial" and lo, and behold, not a week after I made the comment, I posted essentially the same arguments to the Scrum Development mailing list in response to question about how many man days are there in a story point. Dave Rooney of Mayford Technologies wrote back:
"I generally agree with Peter's points..., except that estimating any development effort in hours is a mistake, plain and simple. You are mistaking 'precision' with 'accuracy' in that case, and any estimation is bound to be incorrect.
"What you need to do is to measure the team's *actual* output, and feed that back into the measurements as the velocity. These measurements need to begin as soon as development starts, and need to be made continuously. That's the only way to introduce any accuracy into your estimates."I think there are two perspectives here.
On the one hand, I'm totally in agreement with Dave that estimatin…
"I generally agree with Peter's points..., except that estimating any development effort in hours is a mistake, plain and simple. You are mistaking 'precision' with 'accuracy' in that case, and any estimation is bound to be incorrect.
"What you need to do is to measure the team's *actual* output, and feed that back into the measurements as the velocity. These measurements need to begin as soon as development starts, and need to be made continuously. That's the only way to introduce any accuracy into your estimates."I think there are two perspectives here.
On the one hand, I'm totally in agreement with Dave that estimatin…