Practical writing on planning poker, story point estimation, and agile team dynamics.
August 26, 2026 5 min read
You're not writing the code, so you're guessing at the agent's risk from the outside. Turns out the agent can answer that question better than you can — if you ask it first.
Read →July 30, 2026 5 min read
Fibonacci prevents 'is it a 5 or a 6?' — valid. But your team voted 3, 8, and 13 on the same ticket. The scale isn't what's broken.
Read →July 2, 2026 5 min read
T-shirt sizing feels more honest than story points. It isn't. Both collapse effort, risk, complexity, and uncertainty into a single label — the label size doesn't change what you lose.
Read →June 20, 2026 4 min read
Every explainer says story points measure 'complexity, not time.' But complexity, effort, risk, and uncertainty are four different things that don't move together.
Read →June 2, 2026 4 min read
When a developer with Copilot ships in two hours what took a senior two days last year, your velocity stops making sense. That's not an AI problem — it's proof story points were always missing the right dimensions.
Read →May 25, 2026 4 min read
Your team estimated the 3 correctly. The sprint still missed. Story points measure implementation effort — but integration risk, QA surface, and external dependencies are where delivery actually breaks.
Read →April 25, 2026 5 min read
When one developer votes 3 and another votes 13, they're usually both right — they're just answering different questions. Here's why single-number estimation forces this.
Read →March 24, 2026 5 min read
Teams switch from story points to hours and find the same problems waiting. The issue isn't the unit — it's that one number can't carry what makes a ticket hard.
Read →January 15, 2026 5 min read
The wall of 5s isn't consensus — it's anchoring and groupthink operating exactly as designed, just in the wrong context. Here's the mechanism behind it.
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