Yea, they tell you that they don't believe your estimates and stop asking for them before setting the deadline.

Then that's not agile.

The entire point of agile is that a PM can't do that. Large estimates force a PM to go back to stakeholders and revise the desired features to something that engineers have consensus that should be deliverable within the next sprint given their historical velocity.

If you're not doing that, then you're not even in any conversation about agile/scrum.

I'm almost afraid to ask but what unit of time does that "8 or 13" correspond to?

nah it's all good. it's just the "estimation value" which is technically arbitrary, but a common practice is in a 2-week sprint, 1x eng 1x sprint is ~5 points.

By saying 8pts the team is effectively saying it's probably a 2 sprint job and individual tickets are not supposed to be 2 sprints long meaning there's complexity that either needs to be broken apart or on the rarer case, team agrees the ticket is fine as-is then it'll take 2 sprints.

Anything 13 or greater is saying this ticket is so big we can't even begin to accurately estimate it - PM take it away from us! It's fun to see 21 or 34 pts... it's all a joke at that point.

Is that common? I thought it varied depending on the team, but usually that 1 pt is the shortest meaningful piece of work. Where I work now, 5 pt is not especially much. We have total story points delivered in a sprint around 120.

As mentioned, it's technically arbitrary, so you just need to get used to how your org does it. There's no right or wrong as long as your org agrees on the value of those points... sort of like bitcoin, ha ha (cries in BTC).

You didn't say how long a sprint is nor how large your team is, which makes me suspect that you don't handle measurements well in general.

Thanks. My teams have always estimated in hours (though at times these hours were called points) so I was a bit frightened to hear that an estimation of 13 hours would be considered bad! I guess if 13 means 26 person-days I get why people would be nervous – even I would suggest breaking it down into smaller pieces, if possible!

The main point of points is that they are not supposed to be equivalent to x amount of time.

They're supposed to represent a measure of complexity.

How much time that then takes depends on who does the work, the order in which tickets are implemented, how much distraction there is, luck (do you encounter any unforeseen problems), and so on.

They're then used to see how many issues will fit in a sprint, which is a measure of time. So everybody ends up treating them as representing time anyway...

That’s the theory but it doesn’t help managers so they still convert it back to time somehow.

Scrum was never for managers. If a manager is involved in predictions, it's not scrum. Scrum is about delivering the best you can each month, with client/management setting priorities and then appreciating what they get, instead of trying to steer the car from the boot.

Sure, I get what scrum is. "Scrum" in the real world isn't that though - at least 80% of the common case (check the other comments).

Theoretically it's arbitrary numbers. Then a factor specifically calculated for your team gets applied to it to turn it into hours or days.

But in reality it's ideal hours or ideal days.

The 8 and 13 come from the fibonacci sequence.