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Discussion on: Why I don't like story-point-driven estimates

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Cliff • Edited

Your 3 factors are sort of a rephrasing of the old refrain: "Fast, good, and cheap. Pick 2."

The issue, however, is that the "size of the team" factor ignores Brook's law: adding manpower to a late software project makes it later. I think it's even worse than that, that in a real-world scenario, adding people can never pull forward a delivery date but has a high chance of pushing it back, even if the project is on time or ahead of schedule. There are obviously caveats to this, mostly for long-term planning.

I've seen others say recently that Scrum in general is guilty of the same mistake that so many others make in forgetting the lessons laid out in The Mythical Man-Month, and I'm starting to thing they might be right. I have a lot of criticisms of Scrum, but I think this might be the source of many of them.