The Psychology of Story Points

One of the evergreen topics among Agilists is the debate of story points vs. hours.

My own take on this debate is largely based on what I see as the psychology of estimating with story points versus the psychology of estimating with hours.

Experience has taught me that developers are generally terrible at predicting how many hours it will take for them to do something, and I don’t think that’s entirely their fault.

I think it may be universally true that people who have commissioned a work effort are happier when the work takes less time to complete rather than more time.

There is now a natural pressure on people giving estimates of that work to only cheat in one direction: down, never up.

The brilliance of story points is that when comparing the relative complexity of two chunks of work, the estimator feels no pressure to rate one chunk as less complex or more complex than another. There’s no pressure to cheat.

I fully understand that people who want something badly also want to know how much time it will take to get that thing. But is there any point in getting the answer you desire if it’s always wrong?