Agile Estimation: From a Simple 3-Pointer to a 50-Point Boulder Run
Description
A three-panel meme that uses the iconic golden idol scene from the movie 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' to satirize software development estimation. In the first panel, Indiana Jones eyes the idol with the caption, '5 Story Points?'. In the second panel, he carefully attempts to swap the idol with a bag of sand, and the text reads, 'Hmmm, maybe it's only 3 Story Points?'. The final panel shows him frantically running from the giant boulder, clutching the idol, with the panicked caption, '50! It was 50 points!!!'. The meme perfectly captures the all-too-common scenario in Agile development where a task is initially assessed, then confidently underestimated, only for the team to discover a massive trove of unforeseen complexity (the boulder) once they begin working on it. It humorously illustrates the pain of poor estimation and the sudden, chaotic realization that a seemingly simple task is, in fact, a massive undertaking
Comments
15Comment deleted
That's the face of a dev who just realized the 'simple API change' requires a full database migration and touches three microservices owned by a team that was laid off last quarter
That moment the PO talks your 5-pointer down to a “quick 3,” you deploy, wake a 2004 cron job, and the legacy boulder reminds everyone Fibonacci secretly jumps straight to 50
The only thing more dangerous than swapping out a golden idol is confidently declaring 'it's just a simple CRUD operation' during sprint planning - both trigger ancient mechanisms designed to crush the overconfident
Every senior engineer knows this moment intimately: you confidently estimate a 'simple refactoring' at 3 points during planning, only to discover it's actually a 50-point archaeological expedition through a temple of legacy code, complete with booby traps in the form of undocumented dependencies, circular references, and that one critical service nobody remembers writing. The real treasure isn't the idol - it's making it out alive before the sprint ends and explaining to the PM why 'just updating a few files' somehow triggered a complete system redesign. At least Indiana Jones only had to outrun a boulder; we have to outrun the retrospective
Planning poker: it’s a 3… until the idol hides legacy Oracle + vendor SOAP + SAML + CAB approvals, and suddenly the boulder reads “50”
Planning poker needs a boulder card; once SSO, compliance, and cross‑team dependencies arrive, that 3 quietly promotes itself to 50
Story points measure not the work, but the hubris of the estimator - until the boulder hits
Story points - one of the greatest shits that does not work in tech Comment deleted
It works At least it works much better than attempts to make precise estimation trying to guess exact amount of hours Comment deleted
Erm, but the solving of the problem of when this or that is going to be delivered is not limited to time-bound and relative estimations. Relative estimation is better-suited for tech than time-bound but it does not mean that we should be limited by relative estimation. There is more. Try no-estimates approach. Cheers Comment deleted
It helps devs improving estimates over time and ideally can be used to estimate time. The (managerial) fallacy is that story points in one team cannot be compared to those of another team. Comment deleted
The story points concept helps generate estimates, not bring accurrate time lines for the business. And generally estimations are not the best way to understand when something is going to happen. The forecast is much more accurate. Look up the difference. Guess why story points cannot be compared between different teams? - Because they are relative. It means that they are related to the context of a specific team, therefore, if the context is different, the old measurements become useless. You need a new set of estimations. Last time one of the genius managers tried to combine story points from different teams, it ended disastrously. Comment deleted
What is story points Comment deleted
after a google search what I get is when you estimate the time that your team can complete certain parts of a project Comment deleted
I propose measuring project budget in storydollars. Comment deleted