You, like tbrownaw, are arguing against something I didn't say. (Please go read the sibling thread.) I didn't say that planning, goals, etc. are bad. What I said was that story points lead to bad plans because they oversimplify the complexities of software development. A project timeline can be fine—but only if it is born out of a nuanced discussion and not by adding up a bunch of unitless points.
Developers (at least, ones like me) despise story points because they ask developers to collapse a ton of nuance and detail into a single scalar. It’s about as meaningful as this comparison of food recipes: compress the cook time, number of ingredients, cost of ingredients, quality of ingredients, whether or not some of the ingredients are allergens, and how much you like the food independent of the weather and your mood into a single scalar value and using that to plan what you will eat during the week. Madness!
Story points can enable corporate despotism. Bad managers who demand developers make up story points, and then turn around and use that to dictate what developers will work on—without engaging in a thoughtful discussion on what is feasible and what will keep the product stable—are on a power trip and are treating developers like cogs in a machine. They know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
The good managers that I have had in the past regularly discussed with the dev team what was needed and—with the developers' input and without artificially compressing the complexities of the task at hand—set good goals that gave the dev team focus and direction.
Developers (at least, ones like me) despise story points because they ask developers to collapse a ton of nuance and detail into a single scalar. It’s about as meaningful as this comparison of food recipes: compress the cook time, number of ingredients, cost of ingredients, quality of ingredients, whether or not some of the ingredients are allergens, and how much you like the food independent of the weather and your mood into a single scalar value and using that to plan what you will eat during the week. Madness!
Story points can enable corporate despotism. Bad managers who demand developers make up story points, and then turn around and use that to dictate what developers will work on—without engaging in a thoughtful discussion on what is feasible and what will keep the product stable—are on a power trip and are treating developers like cogs in a machine. They know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.
The good managers that I have had in the past regularly discussed with the dev team what was needed and—with the developers' input and without artificially compressing the complexities of the task at hand—set good goals that gave the dev team focus and direction.
Using story points is lazy management.