[bmj]

>I went through those stages too: when the Agile meetings at my last job got so absurd that we were being asked to estimate JIRA task time in T-shirt sizes

Oh, boy, I can relate. Every three months, I think our program increment planning meetings can't get more ridiculous and, yet, they do. Most recently, we were told that we should just treat story points as days of effort.

[IshKebab]

I don't think t-shirt sizes is absurd. It's one of the few good ways that really conveys "we have only a very vague idea how long this will take".

Story points are dumb because they always are just a bad proxy for time.

Really though, the right solution is time plus confidence. Instead of "4 days" it should be "1-8 days" or whatever.

Unfortunately a large number of people simply can't comprehend this, and also no tools support it, so I've never seen it actually done. I imagine management wouldn't like it either because then they can't pretend they have a perfect plan with no uncertainty.

[Kon-Peki]

> Really though, the right solution is time plus confidence. Instead of "4 days" it should be "1-8 days" or whatever.

It's a half-assed reimplementation of PERT charts, which were invented in the 1950s and used successfully for many decades, until everyone decided that everything old is terrible.

[conductr]

I feel like if that task took 8 days you’d end up having to explain everything that happened and why it couldn’t be done in 1.

[bengale]

At least there is some honesty there. Everywhere that does estimates, even if they make the devs think its complexity or some other nonsense, is translating that to days somewhere down the line.

[swader999]

I spit my coffee all over the table when they ask for days. And they look at me like I'm crazy.

[rvense]

We should call them fairy tale points.