In a recent conversation with colleagues we were debating the merits of using story point velocity as a metric for team performance and, more specifically, how it relates to determining a team's predictability. That is to say, how reliable the team is at completing the work they have promised to complete. At one point, the question of what is a story point came up and we hit on the idea of story points not being "points" at all. Rather, they are more like currency. This solved a number of issues for us.
First, it interrupts the all too common assumption that story points (and by extension, velocities) can be compared between teams. Experienced scrum practitioners know this isn't true and that nothing good can come from normalizing story points and sprint velocities between teams. And yet this is something non-agile savvy management types are want to do. Thinking of a story's effort in terms of currency carries with it the implicit assumption that one team's "dollars" are not another team's "rubles" or another teams "euros." At the very least, an exchange evaluation would need to occur. Nonetheless, dollars, rubles, and euros convey an agreement of value, a store of value that serves as a reliable predictor of exchange. X number of story points will deliver Y value from the product backlog.
The second thing thinking about effort as currency accomplished was to clarify the consequences of populating the product backlog with a lot of busy work or non-value adding work tasks. By reducing the value of the story currency, the measure of the level of effort becomes inflated and the ability of the story currency to function as a store of value is diminished.
There are a host of other interesting economics derived thought experiments that can be played out with this frame around story effort. What's the effect of supply and demand on available story currency (points)? What's the state of the currency supply (resource availability)? Is there such a thing as counterfeit story currency? If so, what's that look like? How might this mesh with the idea of technical or dark debt? How is the team’s effort creating wealth for the them, the company, and the client?
Try this out at your next backlog refinement session (or whenever it is you plan to size story efforts): Ask the team what you would have to pay them in order to complete the work. Choose whatever measure you wish - dollars, chickens, cookies - and use that as a basis for determining the effort needed to complete the story. You might also include in the conversation the consequences to the team - using the same measures - if they do not deliver on their promise.
Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash