During the February Scrum Breakfast in Zurich, the question
arised, "How do I explain Story Points to Management?" A good
question, and in all honesty, developers can be an even more
critical audience than managers. Traditional estimates attempt
to answer the question, "how long will it take to develop X?" I
could ask you a similar question, "How long does it take to get
the nearest train station? The answer, measured in time, depends
on two things, the distance and the speed. Depending on whether
I plan to go by car, by foot, by bicycle or (my personal
favorite for short distances) trottinette, the answer can vary
dramatically. So it is with software development. The
productivity of a developer can vary dramatically, both as a
function of innate ability and whether the task at hand plays to
his strong points, so the time to produce a piece of software
can vary dramatically. But the complexity of the problem doesn't
depend on the person solving it, just as the distance to the
train station does not depend on