[mr_crankypants]

There is one thing I really like about story points: Disagreement about them drives a whole lot of useful conversation, and can reveal communication problems and misunderstandings that are difficult to root out otherwise. That, in turn, should give the PO useful feedback to help with refining the requirements. Which means that story pointing meetings should, in theory, have a huge multiplier effect on productivity, where every hour spent on activities like story pointing saves many hours effort wasted on building unnecessary or mis-scoped or miscommunicated features.

But that requires a very engaged PO who really gets what grooming is really about. Also, I don't know what it is with MBA types, but it really seems like anything that can be turned into a KPI, will be turned into a KPI, without ever pausing to think about whether it makes any sense to do so. And that makes story points radioactive: In the absence of intense and intelligent regulatory oversight, their potential value is more-or-less negated by their potential for abuse and misuse.

Incidentally, this is what fascinates me about the Forth approach: The unflinching dedication to stripping the system down to only the things that you actually need. The problem I see is, the Forth way of doing it seems to assume you're working with an army of one. How do you scale that up to a modern product team that may comprise 10, 50, 100, even 1000 people?