How many times have you heard a trainer, coach, or SCRUM Master lecture about story pointing? Maybe they told you it was the only acceptable way of estimating stories. Maybe they told you a point was absolutely NOT the same as a time interval like a day. Maybe when you took that certification exam there were numerous confusing questions about story pointing leading you to think it was a mandatory part of SCRUM.
Want to know a secret? Story pointing is not a requirement of SCRUM. In the definitive book on SCRUM, the SCRUM Guide, the word "point" is only used three times: "the point of work", and "at any point in time" is there twice.
The only requirements in the SCRUM guide regarding estimation is that it must be done, but the guide never dictates how.
What even is a story point?
Most of us know pointing came from Ron Jeffries and XP. After nearly 2 decades, Ron said this about story points "story points are thinly obfuscated TIME, no more, no less".
In a follow up Twitter message he also noted "after all the fooraw about size, complexity, number of horns, they all come down to how many can we do by date D" https://twitter.com/RonJeffries/status/307481869979635713?s=19
Can I use a time box as a story point, like a day?
If the guy who popularized the use of story pointing says a point is basically a unit of time, I say yes.
Remember, this is only one approach, and you should know and be skilled with a number of estimation techniques. My go to choices are old school story pointing, and normalized story pointing which equates a story point to a day of effort by one person.
As a professional in the the agile delivery community, you are responsible for knowing and understanding as many different approaches to your job as possible. This includes estimation. If you don't expand your understanding of estimation beyond story pointing because it wasn't on the test, you're missing out on a vast amount of great knowledge.
