When you hang out with the types of people I tend to hang out with, some topics come up over and over again. Story points is one such topic. And recently this came up in the context of the impact of story points on an individual contributor.

In other words, as an individual developer, for example, how does the number of story points on a task affect you on a daily basis?

My answer: If you’re using trunk-based development, continuous integration, and continuous delivery… story points become utterly irrelevant at this level.

What I mean by that: If you’re able to break your work into small chunks, such that trunk-based development and micro-PRs are your norm, and you’re deploying your changes multiple times per day… it makes absolutely no difference if the task you’re working on is estimated at 8 points or 3, or 233.