I know, I know. I’m supposed to be estimating using Fibonacci story points, and like Whose Line, the points don’t mean anything, but I have tried it, and I don’t get it.

For one, regular people just translate that to some notion of time anyway, and in that regard, I am very regular. If you are going to take some random number I provide and assign a date to it, I’d much rather I do the translation for you.

Also, I feel like a wrong point estimate is never acknowledged as wrong. It’s just that we didn’t do as many points this sprint as we thought we would. A time estimate is more checkable and less subjective. You can track it using normal means. When I work for two hours on something, that’s two hours. How many points did I just work?

If I say it takes 8 hours and after 4 hours, I say that there’s 6 hours left, I have good feedback on my estimate. If I say something takes 8 points and at the end of the day, I think I’m halfway done, was I right? I don’t think you can make any inferences about the correctness of point estimates without some kind of translation to time, and if you do that, then just use time.

If you love and use story points, that’s great. My only strongly held belief is that people should do what works for them. But, it’s not how I think of how long things take.