Story Points in estimating work

One of effective way to estimate the work in software development is to use Story points. The story points are based on size and complexity, not duration.  They are also become unitless, they not measured by time or another units. One other good quality of story points is that they are additive, unlike time. Also they extremely easy to understand.

Story point values

It’s always important to use the units that make sense. Many teams use such unit sets:

–  T-Shirt sizing: XS, S, M, L, XXL
– Fibonacci Sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40
– The power of two: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32

With the using of this units, it should be also a right strategy. By asking: “How big is this work in sequence from 1 to 10?” it will be very hard to make a good estimation.
The estimation should be used in historical prospective. It is better ask something like this: “Last time we did that work 5 points. Is this work bigger or smaller? How bigger? Two times, three times?”

And the last, but not least. Estimation is not a promise. It’s always a chance that the work can take more or less time. So don’t worry so much.

Related Post

 3 Levels of requirements in Agile development In Software Development Requirements have 3 levels: - expanded description of customers business - business point of view requirements - functionalities which should be made in our application Example: “We need a tool for selecting big data...
Understanding Product Owner Role Responsibility Must have a Shared Vision Developing Winning product Product Owner controls the development effort in order to create a product Other Features A) Create Product Vision B) Maintaining the product backlog C) Release pla...
Scrum with Multiple Teams Scrum says a team should be 3 to 9 people. But sometimes you want or need to go faster, so you add more teams. This process calls Multi-team Scrum or Scaled Scrum. Challenges of Multi-team Scrum Now you need to coordinate not only a single tea...
User Story Scenarios Each User Story needs to be testable, need to demonstrate, that requirement has been met. Here is effective formula, which demonstrate, that specific user story has been met: Given , When Then