He took our advice and designed a fantastic open-space for the 25-person team (big by agile standards at the time). We went on to have a 4.5 year relationship with hundreds of people within Jim’s company, including 2 of the 3 major corporate divisions.įor the first team, Jim bought a complete agile transition package, including our readiness assessment, training and coaching services. Jim loved what he experienced and wanted to immediately bring it back to his teams in Florida. We first got to know this company in 2002, when a Director (I’ll call him Jim) came out to San Francisco to experience our intensive Extreme Programming Workshop. One of first big problems I noticed happened in a large, famous corporation headquartered near Tampa, Florida. I used story points and velocity for another 8 years, both on internal projects and on client projects around the globe.ĭuring that time, I noticed many misunderstandings and misuses of story points and velocity calculations.Īt first, I interpreted these problems as a sign that we needed to do a better job of educating people.īut as the years passed, it became clear that story points and velocity calculations contain deep flaws. Story points and velocity helped teams save time by identifying essential functionality and removing anything unnecessary (or “maximizing the work not done”, an often-repeated mantra). If the work to be done in a timebox didn’t add up to the team’s velocity, it was time for some critical thinking and decision making about must-haves vs. That capacity, calculated as velocity (number of story points completed per timebox), helped people on teams (especially product managers, product owners or internal customers) learn to work within their means. I loved how story points helped identify a team’s work capacity. I started using story points on an Extreme Programming team in a San Francisco startup in 1999. In this blog, I’ll explain why we dropped story points and velocity calculations and what you can do to work successfully without them. Our process today looks nothing like a by-the-book, mainstream Agile method largely because we actively look for process waste and experiment to discover better ways of working.
Those same experiments led us to replace fixed-length sprints with a flow-based workflow, and move from standup meetings to frequent team huddles.
DEFINE STORY POINT MEASURE SERIES
In 2007, a series of experiments led my colleagues and me to increase our agility by dropping story points and velocity calculations. Like researchers of fast food, we now know that the Agile Happy Meal contains unnatural ingredients that decrease agility and cause process indigestion. Sprints, standups and story points have come to symbolize Agile methods much like burgers, fries and cola symbolize fast food.