There is nothing wrong with burndown charts but story points and team velocity are poison.
The way you get good at estimating is looking at your database of experience. “I did a task similar to this in 8 days”. Calendar time is real and punchclock time is real, either can be measured. Story points are not real and not measurable and they leave you lost at sea thinking that estimation is impossible, a scam, etc.
Agreed. Team velocity is a poison number. But entirely necessary in order to provide a data-driven approach to converting story points into time predictions (with appropriate disclaimer of risk) that people outside the team need. Data driven! How could that possibly be a bad thing?
Maybe best to just treat it as a classified secret that nobody actually needs to know. People inside the team just need to know that their stories are arranged in correct order of priority. People outside the team actually do need time axes on their burndown chart. But they don't need to actually know the toxic voodoo that was performed to produce the conversion.
:-P
But actually seriously. Nobody needs to know that number.
The way you get good at estimating is looking at your database of experience. “I did a task similar to this in 8 days”. Calendar time is real and punchclock time is real, either can be measured. Story points are not real and not measurable and they leave you lost at sea thinking that estimation is impossible, a scam, etc.
See also
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Function_point
Which is also a kind of development “funny money” but which have a somewhat rigorous method to arrive at estimates.