Forecasting Without Story Points

This one is still being written — here is the shape of it:

• The question every team dreads: “when will it be done?” — and why estimation theatre (planning poker, re-pointing, velocity maths) doesn’t really answer it.
• The alternative: count finished items per week (throughput), then run a Monte Carlo simulation — thousands of simulated futures sampled from your own history.
• You get a probability distribution, not a date: “85% chance by the 14th” is a more honest sentence than “it’ll be done on the 10th”.
• Walk through a small worked example with real-ish numbers.
• Caveats: needs reasonably sliced work, a stable-ish team, and honesty about scope growth.
• What changed for the team when the conversation moved from estimates to probabilities.