One of the biggest pitfalls of any agile transformation is to make story points the centerpiece for long term planning. Even worse, when companies try to standardize velocity across teams for the sake of long term planning.
The biggest advantage of being agile is throwing away long term planning and estimation. We understand that the world is ever-changing and we cannot predict the future.
Welcome changing requirements, even late in development.
http://agilemanifesto.org/principles.html
Agile processes harness change for the customer’s competitive advantage.
So who should use story points and why are they useful?
Story points are only useful for the team itself.
The purpose of story points is to help the team understand what was delivered during this sprint and plan the future one. We call it predicting by using yesterday’s weather.
Using story points in any other way is to invite failure. It’s going back to the old way of doing things. Ways that have been proven time and time again that won’t work are a risk and invite failure.
Cheers,
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