Cognitive Load is what matters

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16 points·irrationaljared··3 comments

We've been having a debate at work about how to measure "story points" in Agile. I've been insisting that it needs to be an estimate of time spent. It is the fraction of developer resources expected to be consumed by a task.

The other side of the debate insists it's a measure of complexity a.k.a. cognitive load. This story amounts to an argument in favor of that.

I've been thinking of complexity as just a useful proxy to arrive at a decent estimate of time. But if "cognitive load is what matter" it's more than a proxy, it's the thing we should be estimating and focusing on.

Since the risk of mis-measured time increases as complexity increases, maybe it is indeed better to make story points a measure of cognitive load rather than just time, since the former includes a better way to estimate the accuracy of the estimate.

thinking in terms of time encourages you to incorrectly think of complexity as linear, imho

I think both factors are important as the goal is generally to help with planning and prioritization. A straight-forward but long task is still "expensive" with regard to prioritization and will take a while even if the cognitive load is not super high. That said, I think the observation that cognitive load is a good thing to watch out for as it introduces more risk to the estimation is very valid.

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