Looking back, I can see that I spent a big part of my career collecting the ideas that would eventually become Confidence Engineering™. One of the moments that stuck with me came when I saw Ryan Ripley say, “story points are trash.” At the time, that felt like a wild thing to say.
My first reaction was defensive. I wanted to push back immediately. But that feeling passed pretty quickly, and instead of arguing with it, I got curious. So, I started digging into what he meant.
Ryan and Todd Miller talk about this on Your Daily Scrum, and that was where I first heard the fuller explanation. The point was not that estimation is evil. The point was that story points often create more confusion than clarity, especially when organizations start treating them like a measure of productivity. Worse is when people start clinging to them as the law.
The more I sat with it, the more I realized they had a point.
Through Ryan and Todd, I then found Daniel Vacanti of ActionableAgile who elegantly dictates the replacement of SCRUM through the acts of paying more attention to flow, forecasting, and the limits of traditional story point estimation. That pushed the whole conversation into a much more practical place for me.
What became clear for me over time was that story points were never bad, it’s the dependency on them as the source of forecasting truth that was. Treating story points this way is a symptom of low confidence. When the business doesn’t have confidence in IT, and IT doesn’t have confidence in its software development lifecycle, that pressure rolls downhill to development teams. And when confidence is low, teams are forced to predict when work will be complete through the story pointing process because numbers feel like control. However, if the architecture of your software application is brittle, testing is slow, releases are stressful, and handoffs create drag, those story point numbers will never represent reality.
That is where the discipline “Flow of Work” from Confidence Engineering™ started to come into focus for me. The direct replacement of story point estimations is forecasting from work-item flow. Instead of pointing stories and hoping the numbers tell us when something will be done, we can use actual flow metrics to make probabilistic predictions about delivery. That is a much more grounded way to estimate because it is based on how work really moves, not how big we think something feels in a planning meeting.
If you want the original spark for this line of thinking, here is the Your Daily Scrum episode that started it for me. I would also invite you to view their additional videos where they dialogue with Daniel Vacanti:
(1084) YDS: STORY POINTS ARE TRASH! - YouTube
Your team doesn’t need more processes. It needs more confidence.
The Six Disciplines of Confidence Engineering lays out a practical path to safer, faster, more predictable software delivery—build better products and deliver value faster without adding more ceremonies, gates, or meetings.