Deadlines are pointless – what to do instead
Absolutely anything is better than sprint pointing. This garbage process was adopted from what I can only assume is some cabal of &quot;agile consultants&quot;. I have over 10 years in the industry. I cannot estimate something with less than a 20% margin. An estimate requires you to know everything up front, at that moment, for it to be accurate. Anyone who has made software knows this is never the case. The only thing it allows, and what I can assume is the only reason it continues, is because it&#x27;s a job creation program for &quot;agile certified&quot; project managers and it produces a nice burn down&#x2F;up chart you can show the manager. Sure, you can call points deadlines, but they are not. It&#x27;s an arbitrary measurement of a unit of work that in total makes up a two week &quot;deadline&quot;. Two weeks isn&#x27;t enough to produce good code on anything more complicated than a boilerplate application.<p>Deadlines are far better. Tell me something needs to be done by next month it will be done. I can negotiate inside these bounds to prevent scope creep because a deadline is far more flexible than points. If you find yourself done with deadline work, you can refine and add touch ups. If you find yourself done with pointed work the PM will just assign you more work to &quot;keep your points up&quot; instead of allowing you to do the same.<p>The tyranny of the agile PM hinges on convoluted point systems. Even the one the writer prescribes. Force the management to actually agree on a deadline that is reasonable (not ship me facebook next week) and watch how productive and accurate developers can actually be. Read the comments here. Agile has been butchered to the point it&#x27;s unrecognizable. Give me deadlines.