Comparison
Story pointvsT-shirt sizing
Story point
the team sized it a five, and someone in a status meeting asked how many days a five is.
A unit of relative size used to compare pieces of work without committing to a duration. It works because humans compare better than they measure, and it stops working the moment anyone converts points to days or compares two teams' points. Most of the arguments about story points are really arguments about that conversion, which is a governance problem rather than an estimation technique.
Full entry →T-shirt sizing
you sorted twelve ideas into small, medium and large in twenty minutes, which was all the decision needed.
Deliberately coarse estimation used to compare options rather than schedule them. Its virtue is honesty about precision: at the stage where you are choosing what to do, the difference between three and five days is noise and the difference between a week and a quarter is the whole decision. It becomes a problem only when a large is later asked to become a date without any of the work in between.
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