Cliff Berg
1 min readMay 30, 2020

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It is true that many people expend too much energy on story estimation. Your are right - they don't measure value. They do have a use: to enable a PO to trade off projected effort versus value, and historical velocity informs one in projecting what might get done by a time in the future. But the points themselves are meaningless, and do not indicate value.

I also agree with the excellent point that velocity is meaningless unless one also estimates technical debt accumulation.

I also agree that the sprint review is an idiotic ceremony. Story acceptance should occur as each story is completed.

And the points about the misuse of the term "done" are well taken. A better term might be "potentially deployable" - indicating that all tests pass - including integration tests.

"...the structure of Scrum enables a lot of success theater to happen. My honest suggestion is to just get rid of it." YES. Its ceremonies, and endless debate about them, distract from things that actually matter much more!!

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Cliff Berg

Author and leadership consultant, IT entrepreneur, physicist — LinkedIn profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cliffberg/