I understand your gripe but in a business setting you need some estimate of cost, even if it's on the order of hours, days, weeks etc. In my experience it's often cheaper to just get stuck in rather than trying to accurately predict the effort, since a single developer prototyping some solution for 10 hours goes further than 10 developers in a meeting for an hour. I'd say call a spade a spade, and put time estimates on these tasks, and admit that velocity is a measure of your bias (if you correctly estimate it will always be 1).
What really gets me about story points are the Agile folks who say "story points are a measure of complexity not effort/time". As if adding more complexity in the same amount of time were a good thing...
What really gets me about story points are the Agile folks who say "story points are a measure of complexity not effort/time". As if adding more complexity in the same amount of time were a good thing...