Agile Anti-Patterns: #4-5

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  

Using story points for estimation seems simple enough, but many teams fall back on old habits without realizing that they are misusing one of the key innovations of the Agile methodology. In the third installment of our series, we look at two more agile anti-patterns: conflating story points with story value, and relying on an anchor story.

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. One entire class of these problems revolves around the proper use of story points, and our second article explored two more ways that story points can be used incorrectly.

The idea behind using story points for estimation seems simple, and easily relatable to concepts that the team understands. Because of this, teams tend to fall back on old habits without realizing that they are misusing one of the key innovations of the Agile methodology. And since story points is at the core of much of the methodology, starting off with an incorrect foundation will lead the team down the wrong path. In some cases, these seemingly simple ideas can actually harm an organization’s adoption of Agile entirely.

With that as the background…

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