Story Points are Pointless, Measure Queues

I came across an article with a provocative title: Story Points are Pointless, Measure Queues. It’s an interesting read and something worth considering for any engineering team.

A few key quotes:

I have personally seen teams spend over 30 minutes simply discussing whether a story was worth 3 points or 5 points, without writing down a single detail of their reasoning following the discussion!

“1 hour of planning can save you 1000 hours of coding. 1 hour of coding can save your 1000 hours of planning. There is no science to figuring out which case you’re in. Only art.” - Robert Roskam

There is one way to control the flow rate from the support queue: quality control and rapid response to support issues. Higher quality control is designed to reduce the output of issues which could potentially trigger support requests. Rapid response allows you to immediately deal with any issues that quality control didn’t catch but your customers did. Address customer issues as your first priority, find and resolve the root causes, improve your quality control process to ensure that it would catch similar issues in the future before your customers do. Some organizations will have a dedicated production support team, designed to absorb the influx from the support queue which can work, but in order to make that work this team must also have the authority to institute preventative measures to create influence on long term quality control.

If you do that, you will reduce or stop the flow rate from the support queue and allow your team to focus on maximizing the flow of new features long term. If you choose to ignore or downplay the support queue to focus on shipping new features, the result will be a perpetually clogged system of developers that is always behind schedule. It’s a mathematical certainty.