Long comment from http://agilepainrelief.com/notesfromatooluser/2010/02/misuse-of-velocity-in-agile-projects.html has turned into a post here.
Scrum and Agile is something I'm particularly interested in and enthused about. But it is strange how many people throw the terms around or even claim to work on Agile teams without a background in the reasons and common applications of Agile. I'm not saying you have to do everything in your Agile book, but at least read one!
Some of these comments make my eyes bulge out a little bit. I think even the most elementary book on scrum makes it really clear why we use story points and why they are the basis of all sprint planning.
Now granted, this is *really* hard to use when you are responsible to a client and have to invoice weekly with the # of hours of work performed and estimate ahead of time what they will get for X. Time and Materials or fixed bid, client's have expectations. But outside of that, if you can get a client who is happy to use agile that basically means they hire X full-time people for N number of days - and hope to fullfil part of an agreed upon roadmap.
In that case, the point is that you will never have the