Story points are difficult to difficult, and this article does a really good of explaining why. I see the usefulness of Queues, even if I don’t fully agree that it’s a silver bullet for all the problems of Story Points. In the end, it’s estimating and planning that’s hard. That’s always going to be true. But it’s helpful frmaing.
Story points do not represent Time, yet the Velocity metric they are usually combined with defacto converts them to time, sabotaging everyone from the start by doing the thing that you can’t do with a precise number and a range…adding them together.
First off, a queue is simply a list of work to be done. A backlog of stories. A list of tasks. When discussing queues in Reinertsen’s terms, we’re focused two things: Queue Size and Capacity Utilization. The closer you move to 100% capacity utilization, the larger your queues will grow which will dramatically increase variability of all of your work.
