Sure, if you're just churning out the same shit week-in-week-out (new button, new field, new view, new table, new query, etc), then measuring "complexity" becomes a matter of looking up the task in a list. But if you're doing real software engineering, then you won't be able to make a consistent, unbiased measure.
I'd argue the preceding thing you described is real software engineering. Decomposing hard ideas into a lot of super boring practical things with routine solutions == ???.
Most hard ideas can't be practically decomposed. That's why they're hard. We don't have routine solutions for the hard stuff.
Also how do you quantify tasks? If one dev hammers out 20 widgets in a day is that comparable to another dev who spent all day hunting down a bug or coming up with an optimization that improved the performance of the app?
>> Most hard ideas can't be practically decomposed.
Yes! This is the crux of the problem. If a hard idea CAN be decomposed, or even a non-novel but complex need, it's the decomposition that's the hard work. It's "how to draw an owl" all over again.
But having those points systems there will also promote getting this certain task done asap, without consideration for future ease of development or maintainability.
E.g. you could build this new form field for 2 story points, but you could put in 4 story points, to make it a 1 story point task in the future.
