1. Sometimes your team needs to give an estimate of when it will deliver a feature. The idea of pointing in Scrum is that you establish a velocity, which lets you get a feel for how long it's going to take to deliver a given piece of work.
2. Sometimes your team needs to make trade-offs, and often the right lens here is ROI. You can't estimate ROI if you don't estimate the I. (Although I believe agile tends to somewhat overrate the usefulness of the ROI lens.)
3. In the absence of 1 or 2, the act of pointing can help to catch the case where you miss a piece of complexity; if someone thinks it's 8 and everyone else is a 5, then maybe they are aware of some gnarly code that everyone else has forgotten?
I'm not arguing in favor of discussing each story to death, just making a more general justification for the practice. If you never need to do 1 or 2, then maybe pointing isn't going to be useful for your team at this time -- and that's OK too.
I'm sure in some cases this is just driven by managers needing metrics to measure their teams by, but the above is an attempt to suggest some reasons that the teams themselves might find the practice useful.
1. Sometimes your team needs to give an estimate of when it will deliver a feature. The idea of pointing in Scrum is that you establish a velocity, which lets you get a feel for how long it's going to take to deliver a given piece of work.
2. Sometimes your team needs to make trade-offs, and often the right lens here is ROI. You can't estimate ROI if you don't estimate the I. (Although I believe agile tends to somewhat overrate the usefulness of the ROI lens.)
3. In the absence of 1 or 2, the act of pointing can help to catch the case where you miss a piece of complexity; if someone thinks it's 8 and everyone else is a 5, then maybe they are aware of some gnarly code that everyone else has forgotten?
I'm not arguing in favor of discussing each story to death, just making a more general justification for the practice. If you never need to do 1 or 2, then maybe pointing isn't going to be useful for your team at this time -- and that's OK too.
I'm sure in some cases this is just driven by managers needing metrics to measure their teams by, but the above is an attempt to suggest some reasons that the teams themselves might find the practice useful.