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The Worst Programmer I Know (dannorth.net)
submitted 3 years ago by to c/programming@programming.dev
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[–] 38 points 3 years ago (2 children)

Story points and velocity always felt to me like a flawed metric. It encourages volume of work, and discourages quality of work. The worse your code is, the more stories and tasks you can create to fix it, and the higher your velocity. It's a bit of a shame that it's used so widely as a measurement of work completed, and I wish a better means of measuring productivity would become more popular instead.

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  • [–] 28 points 3 years ago (1 child)

    It's not flawed. Nobody should get rewarded or encouraged by story points. It's solely a planning metric and not a metric of productivity.

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  • [–] 6 points 3 years ago* (1 child)

    I guess the flaw is that it's (almost) never used only for planning and is often used as a metric of productivity, from my experience. It becomes a competition to see who can check off the most story points, and velocity is often used to compare developers against each other.

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  • [–] 7 points 3 years ago*

    Story points are meant to have a shared understanding about complexity during the planning phase. There where never meant (and do not fit) for either capacy planning or to measure the throughput.

    If your PO is using this he or she is either not well informed and/or uses this as a tool to create toxic pressure.

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