I find there to be something appealing about No Estimates, and Ron lays down someinteresting thoughts.
I worked with one team who had a whole schema set up. After lengthy discussion of the story, they’d pull up their reference spreadsheet, fiddle with numbers for ‘testing effort’, tribal knowledge’, ‘external dependency’ etc. Half-hour later, they’d come to consensus with the point value I had in my head simply based on a count of the number of acceptance criteria. So I get what Ron means by waste. I tried advocating for getting stories to a more ‘universal size’ but wasn’t able to get traction.
I’m also reminded of another team at that org. The team wasn’t comfortable with actual point values, so the Scrum Master had them using T-shirt sizing. He told me they got to the point (pun intended, I guess) where they’d say “This is a Medium… So that’s a 3, right…?”
Closing comment - I often feel that velocity turns into a bigger forecasting tool, instead of ‘next sprint planning’. (Possibly rhetorical question:) Why isn’t lead/cycle time used more widely for projections? Does the Coalition have any success stories here?