Steve, great article. I have struggled with some of these things to “get right” as well since 2002 at various companies. And fighting the “purist” mentality with the “realistic” way to do it. Our team currently is more senior people in skill and self-managed time. We may try the 1 day = 1 story point. We use 7 hrs as meetings usually suck up some time in the day on average of 1 hr for now. Hopefully we get better at this. The overlap of QA and Dev works well also. And adjust as we go.

Thank you!