Story Points :facepalm:

Why is that many leaders still don’t get what is story point based estimation?

An attempt to explain the basics.

What Are Story Points?

Story point is a relative value of the size of a story in comparison with another story. For a team we can have multiple such base stories to ease estimation as every team member might not be aware of every type of work. The absolute values we assign are unimportant and what matters is only the relative values.

What Values To Use For Story Points?

In practice, we can use the fibonacci series (pronounced as fibi-no-chi), which takes these values - 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13

What If The Story Point is Higher Than 13?

That indicates that the story is actually too big to be handled as a single item. Discuss and work with the product owner and split into multiple stories as functional slices. Do not split into pieces like "Write Code" and "Testing" as two different stories. That introduces waterfall into Scrum.

Who Does Story Point Estimates?

It's the Team. There are multiple ways to do this when there are many scrum teams. The core idea is that it's a relative value and hence to maintain uniformity it needs to be done in a uniform way across sprints.

• Team representatives sit together and do this estimates during the Grooming meeting for the top 10-15 items for 3-4 scrum teams. (Use planning poker)
• Delegate this to an individual who is well aware of the complexities and technical details of the project.

What's the Use of Story Point Estimates?

This is to achieve what is known as the burn down of Epics and Stories (this is very different than the Sprint burn down which is based on effort estimates of tasks which is in hours). This is critical in doing Release planning which in turn helps to make customer commitments.

Let's take an example.

• An Epic has a total story point of 100. (Remember this value of 100 itself changes over times as team starts the implementation and more and more stories surface)
• The team is able to burn on an average of 10 story points over the last three sprints (it's always a rolling average of last three sprints). This is also called as velocity of the team.
• Let's assume that out of 100 story points, 40 is already completed.
• So to burn the remaining 60, it will take 60/10 = 6 more sprints to complete the Epic.