More Agile Anti-Patterns

Bart has been in ecommerce for over 20 years, and can't imagine a better job to have. He is interested in all things agile, or anything new to learn.

  Agile   Estimating   Scrum   ProjectsAtWork  

Story points are one of the most misunderstood and misused aspects of the Agile methodology. In the second installment of our series on Agile Anti-Patterns, we look at two more ways that story points can be used incorrectly, making the team both less agile and more frustrated in the process.

In the first article of this series, we explored the concept of anti-patterns in Agile project management. That article goes much more in depth about the overall idea, but for our purposes here, we are going to define an anti-pattern as a common solution to a common problem that rarely or never works. I’m personally fascinated with the concept, so you’ll hear me talk about them frequently; it’s amazing that independent groups of very smart people come up with the same failed solutions to common problems, over and over again.

In this article, we are continuing on the topic of story points, and how they are misunderstood and often misused in ways that seem to make a lot of sense to all involved. Unfortunately, rather than making adoption of Agile easier, making these common mistakes will usually make it harder.

Story Point Anti-Pattern #2: Not including everything

Anti-pattern #1 discussed the problem with immediately translating story points into effort. This is a very similar problem, and a very tempting one to do. The Agile methodology generally suggests that only people …

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