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Comment by lbatx | Hacker News Reader

> If your agile ceremonies end up being all about giving management control -- if your story points are used to tell management how much work is getting done, if management is using the daily standup to make sure people are on-task instead of being about commitments.

Story points being used for the team and to tell management how much work is being done are not mutually exclusive. I'm also not sure of your distinction between "on-task" and "commitments". If I've made a commitment, there are some tasks that need to be performed to meet that commitment, no?

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> Story points being used for the team and to tell management how much work is being done are not mutually exclusive.

That's the thing though, in reality they really are mutually exclusive. As soon as management starts using a metric to measure the team's performance, that metric stops being useful for the team to improve itself, because now there is a perverse incentive to inflate the metric to get performance rewards.

Metric inflation. It’s a thing.

Don’t let anyone show you a two year graph of story points.

Yes. Goodhart's Law: "When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure." As soon as management starts looking at story points, it's a scramble to get the most points possible in a sprint (or at least, to not let velocity go down).

I had a VP, new to my company, come to me and say, 'Your velocity is pathetic, at my last company my engineers were doing 14-16 points a sprint, yours are only doing 8-10'. I tried to explain how that wasn't a thing and we could just start doubling our points. He seemed to indicate that's what I should do ... I started looking.

In a daily standup, it should be about commitments _to your teammates_, not to management. In other words, Bob needs to do X before Alice can do Y, so Bob commits to Alice about his work on X. If there's problems, they can talk about it. That's not the same as some middle manager coming in and going, you need to do X to hit some KPI.

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