The fatal flaw of story points, plus a note on wildland firefighting
We lament the lack of verifiable statements in business, embodied through story points. We also learn how wide a mineral dirt road needs to be to have a reasonable chance of slowing down or stopping a wildfire!
Hello! Fires and fantasies to you!
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Why Story Points Don’t Work
A prevalent problem in business is a refusal to make statements verifiable. This is a problem because it prevents us from knowing if we are successful or not. A verifiable statement needs to be tied to reality in such a way that there is a process by which it can be judged right or wrong in hindsight. Story points are highly unverifiable and thus an extension of this problem.
Full article (5–10 minute read): Why Story Points Don't Work
Flashcard of the week
A fireline is a dirt road dug specifically to stop a wildfire from spreading in a particular direction.
How wide should a fireline be?
Guessing the answer might be easier if we know the purpose of digging a fireline: it removes organic matter from the upper layer of soil, because otherwise a wildfire can spread by burning this organic matter as fuel.
Another hint is the "dirt road" description.
A fireline should be about 2.5 metres wide.
Note that this excludes things like cutting down larger fuels like trees. If a tall tree catches fire it can spread embers much further than 2.5 metres.
(Also the needed width of the fireline depends on the situation at hand. They can be far narrower and still be useful, or they need to be 50 metres to be useful. I have a flashcard asking for 2.5 metres just to make sure I have an idea in my head of what order of magnitude is most often discussed.)
What surprised me when I learned about wildland firefighting (mostly through Matthew Desmond's On the Fireline: Living and Dying with Wildland Firefighters) is how little it depends on water. When fighting wildfires, dirt is a more common weapon than water. Water removes oxygen and heat from an actual flaming fire, but
(a) it requires that we get close to the fire, which is rather dangerous with a wildfire; and
(b) it takes a non-trivial amount of water to cool down and remove oxygen from a large fire.
Instead we focus on dirt – the absence of fuel – not to extinguish the wildfire at its source, but to limit in which directions it gets to spread, and then wait for it to starve itself by burning through the fuel it does get.