Story Points Considered Harmful

Here's a really interesting and thoughtful discussion of story point estimating by Vasco Duarte: Software Development Today: Story Points Considered Harmful - Or why the future of estimation is really in our past.... He's just followed it up (Software Development Today: A better way to predict project release date!) with analysis from one project which shows that forecasts based on counting stories were more accurate than forecast based on story points. I'd like to see more data, which hopefully will be forthcoming from other projects submitting data, but given the cost of estimating - whether using story points or other metrics - these results provide a very good basis for forecasting in a much simpler way. I look forward to more on this in the future.