alt Hacker NewsWhen management starts tracking improvements in story point productivity then the agile teams inflate their story point estimates. Sometimes this involves splitting user stories in ways that don't really make sense from a customer perspective just for the sake of having a place to tack on more points.
And I'm not opposed to using story points, they have some utility within an agile team or program. They just aren't a valid way of quantifying productivity changes.
A few years ago I was on a massive project to rebuild and redesign a major public facing portal. Our dev team was nails, cranking out features and components on a very tight time table. Several other teams were inflating their story point estimates so when the higher ups would get their weekly reports, our team was always in dead last for completing story points.
Our manager brought us into an all hands meeting and kind of read us the riot act because now we were on "Bob the executive" radar because it looked like we really weren't delivering much week by week. Had anybody actually looked at the amount of work we were doing and what we were shipping, it wouldn't be close.
Exactly as you predicted, we started over inflating our stories, creating Epics when they weren't needed, breaking out a single feature into a dozen or more stories. Over the next few weeks, we were all getting pats on the back for "really picking up the pace". When in reality, we were just doing the same thing we always did.
It just reinforced the idea that Agile had turned into a system that was easy to manipulate to create the illusion you were doing more than you really were. I imagine we're going to see a lot more of this as C-Suite folks start clamoring for ROI on the millions they're spending on tokens.