We’ve been riding the agile wave for too long. Let’s face it: story points don’t work.

In every single dev team I was part of, we’ve used story points as an alias for time units (hours, days.) – no shame on admitting that.

No manager, product owner, or CTO care if creating an AWS Glue ETL job is twice as big as setting up a Glue Crawler. When is it going to be ready? How much time do you need? How much is it going to cost?

Here we can learn from the construction industry: the first time you estimate a serverless big data data pipeline, your numbers will be off. By how much? That depends, but you have the choice to re-estimate as you get more details about the project.

In construction, the first budget is not the final budget. As things change during the design phase, you can come up with more accurate estimates that stakeholders will feel satisfied with.

Leo Celis