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Re:Scrum Sucks by inanutshellus on Monday January 15, 2024 @12:29PM (#39003512)
Scrum teams are self-managing, and point values are used for gauging your own team-workload.

When you point a "0.5" and your team points a "5", stop and discuss the discrepancy until an alignment can me found. Keep doing that, every task, until you a collective meaning of "a point" is found.

Personally:

* Less than 1 - These are a smell and should not exist. These misalign incentives and encourage "bike shedding".

* 1 point tasks - no task that requires 2 people (dev and qa) is a 1-pointer, so this is something that needn't be QA'd. 1 point tasks should be rare items that can't be a subtask of a "real" task.

* 3 point tasks - These can be done in a day (depending on the team's opinion, this might be multiple people and still be 3 points). Virtually every task should be a 3.

* 5 point tasks - These are tasks that cannot be broken down to be done in a reasonable amount of time. These are generally things that have minor external dependencies. ("not hard but I'll have to get a server spun up by the unix admins.")

* 8 point tasks - These are rough tasks that haven't been fully dissected by the team and are the scrum version of a "code smell". The team should break these down and dissect them.

* 13 point tasks - "There be dragons here" tasks. Large unknowns and these tasks should not be added to a sprint until they're broken down further.

Re:Scrum Sucks by ed_elliott_asc on Monday January 15, 2024 @12:39PM (#39003642)
Meetings are long enough without people spending extra effort doing it right :)
Re:Scrum Sucks by inanutshellus on Monday January 15, 2024 @01:58PM (#39004617)
Sharpen the saw, man.

It's a one-time conversation (per new team configuration) that makes every conversation thereafter fast.

My team's pointing sessions are lightning.

Even when you do have a new team member that wants to discuss a "0.5-vs-5" point disparity, you explain the above in less time it took to read it and get back to work.

Re:Scrum Sucks by Scea91 on Tuesday January 16, 2024 @06:37AM (#39012161)
If you measure velocity then the points are additive, how do you reconcile 3 point tasks doable in a day and 5 point tasks not doable in a reasonable amount of time?

Isn't 5 points less than 2 days then?

For the record, in my team we don't use story points or measure velocity. I just had a frustrating discussion with a peer team that didn't plan an important task because "its 5 points and does not fit into a sprint".