A long time ago, before most people (including me) had ever heard of the concept of story points, I came in as the CTO at a major social networking site. The dev team, even though staffed with a lot of excellent developers, had experienced enormous historical difficulty in delivering according to expectations, theirs or anyone else’s. People both inside and outside of the team complained that the team wasn’t delivering big projects on a timely basis, plus there were a lot of small-but-important items that never got done because the team was focused on larger work.

What’s the team’s capacity, I asked? How much can it reasonably take on before it becomes too much? How do we viably fit in smaller items along with the major initiatives, instead if it being an either/or? No one really knew, or even had thought much about what seemed like natural (even mandatory) questions to be asking.

At the time, I declared that it seemed like we just needed some abstract unit of capacity (I jokingly proposed the first Carrollian word that popped into my head: Quocknipucks) that could be used to help us “fill up the jar” with work items, large and small, without overfilling it. Each item would be valued in terms of its number of Quocknipucks, representing some approximation of size, and we’d come up with a total team capacity for a given time frame by using the same invented Quocknipuck units, which we would adjust as we gained experience with the team, the platform, the flow.

Little did I know that I was independently coming up with the basic idea behind story points. Interestingly, the term I chose was deliberately whimsical, to separate the concept from things in the real world like the actual amount of time needed for any particular item.

Here’s what I’ll argue: the basic idea behind story points is sound, and useful; yet, somehow a certain set of Agilists has now come to reject story points entirely, even referring to them (wrong-headedly and quite overstated) as “widely discredited”.

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