Why Story Points are a bad idea for measuring developer productivity

Martin Thoma
7 min readSep 10, 2024
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People want to be good in their jobs and make decisions they can justify. For this reason, data-driven decisions are a wildly popular concept.

Since 2000 we want to be way more data driven according to Google Trends — even more than we want to be customer-centric 😉

One of the most expensive parts of software development is the salary of software engineers. Hence it makes sense to make them as efficient as possible.

Writing software is hard as it is typically something new if you continue development of one product. That means there are few to none repetitive tasks. That makes estimating the amount of work very hard for anything non-trivial in software engineering. On the other hand: If you have done it before, it very quickly becomes trivial 😁

Tech companies bundle a minimal set of features that provides value to a user to so-called user stories (short: stories). Multiple stories that go into the same direction are bundled in one Epic, but for this article we stay at the short-term planning and thus with stories.

Short-term planning is anything below two months. Typically also below one month.

Reasons for Short-Term Planning

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Martin Thoma

I’m a Software Engineer with over 10 years of Python experience (Backend/ML/AI). Support me via https://martinthoma.medium.com/membership