meme credit to Oleg M via Rands
Moving from traditional Scrum to something like Evidence Based Planning can be a challenging journey. Jumping from being able to prioritize and work a 13 point ticket directly to only being able to have 1 point tickets (ie, points no longer mattering) … isn’t going to go well. Like any change management, this has to be a gradual process. 8 then 5 then 3 etc…
In your first step, you may say “we can log 13 point tickets, but they have to be broken down into 8 point tickets before they can be prioritized.”
In your next step, you may say all tickets must be 8 points or less, at all times. But we developers are known for having a pedantic streak:
“You mean, all tickets must be 8 points or fewer.”
The key question for less vs fewer is countability. Are story points countable nouns? Even if they’re abstract nouns, I’m inclined to say they should be able to be counted.
And here’s the eternal rub about story points. What do they actually represent? The official definition says they are a ‘subjective, relative measure of effort.’ So, they’re an abstract concept, with no substantial grounding in space-time. 3 story points does NOT universally equal 2 days of work, no matter what your scrum master tells you. But they’re still a measurement …
As a philosophy minor, I’m inclined to have this debate in the abstract, and in the purest form of the original concept of story points. However, I’m afraid that story points only exist as a tool we have to use in our daily work, and therefore must be debated in their practical impact in the real world.
But counting implies whole integers. I’ve seen people try to do “0.5 points” and “2.5 points” before. Which feels more like story points are a measurement. RuffMixa555 on Reddit says this is the difference between pure math and science. Pure math (and philosophy) works in ideal abstract concepts, while science does its best to accurately represent the real world (to the furthest precision it can). And again, we’re focussing on the practical impact in the real world. Despite the fact Ron Jeffries swore off story points in 2019, we still have to deal with them in our day to day.
Although tools like Jira and AzDo’s encourage whole integers with their UI (number spinner fields), both allow decimals values in their various story point fields. It seems, in practice, story points can’t just be counted, if decimals happen. Only whole tickets can be counted.
And so, my dear pedant, it’s “8 story points or less.”
The harder thing than pedantic teammates, is actually getting the team to reliably follow max-story point guidelines. For that, I recommend looking at Point Guard for Jira. It allows the system to enforce max story point rules. It’s presently an MVP, but will be more configurable in the next release.
