Cats, Cucumbers and Story Points
The Toxic Venom of Story Points and Velocity
Do you know what happens when you quietly slide a cucumber next to a cat?
The cat will jolt up and run away in fear.
This happens because our mammal brains are prediction machines. The cucumber gets mistaken for a snake. A snake means danger, so the cat immediately jumps away to escape the danger.
Our brain loves predicting. However that prediction machine, just like the cucumber that gets misinterpreted as a snake, comes with significant biases and mistakes. Our minds love turning cucumber into snakes, especially if we lack information and understanding.
An example of the cucumber that gets mistaken for a snake is the lack of predictability in software development.
Complex work means many surprises. What you thought to be a snake turns out to be a cucumber. The cucumber may even turn out to be a snake.
In other words, no matter what we do some of our predictions will turn out to be wrong and there will be many surprises. Because our brain doesn’t like when it can’t predict, it will still find a way to pretend it can predict.
Pretending to predict when we can’t predict is where Story Points and Velocity come in.
We waste a lot of time to arrive at silly numbers, so we can pretend that we’ve discovered all the snakes. In the process, we create a gazillion cucumbers that we treat as scary snakes.
We lose sight of what truly matters and get distracted by the cucumbers we treat as snakes. We forget to pay attention to the real snakes that matter.
Focus On Snakes and Not Cucumbers
If you want to focus on the real snakes that matter, stop wasting too much time on estimation. Try something else, like Roman Estimation, that prevents you from getting distracted by cucumbers.
Stop wasting time on estimation, it’s a fool’s game.
The irony of an obsessive focus on prediction, Story Points and Velocity:
The more you try to prevent sucking at predicting, the more you will guarantee to suck at adapting.
When we become better at adapting we make more progress and our predictions will become more accurate as a result.
Focus on keeping your boots on the ground and evading the snakes, not keeping your head in the sky and spawning imaginary cucumbers.
It’s easy to say and extremely hard to do, because remember: our brains are prediction machines and they hate not knowing.