But companies doing SAFe can use developer velocity to help judge individual dev productivity. That can be surprising if you aren't aware of what story points are used for.
I'm not saying it's useful, just that I found out it was a metric for management. I was originally expecting it to be an internal metric. The company I was at actually used it in performance reviews somewhat comparable to stack ranking.
There was an expectation that devs complete about 8 points a sprint. I don't know if the eight point target is common, but SAFe does talk about comparing story points across teams.
> At scale, it becomes difficult to predict the story point size for larger epics and features when team velocities can vary wildly. To overcome this, SAFe teams initially calibrate a starting story point baseline where one story point is defined roughly the same across all teams.
...
> Give every developer-tester on the team eight points for a two-week iteration
This is a hot button for me also. Story points are a solid measure of complexity, but when it comes to estimates on a planned timeline over the next few weeks I want it in hours or days.
Otherwise, somebody ends up trying to convert story points into hours and that's not what it's there to measure.
I wrote extensively about this a couple of years ago before I found out about SAFe itself.
