Much has been written about the problems with story points. What do they mean? Why do we use them? My intention is not convince you of their value, but here is how I use them, and what they mean to me. Maybe this will be of use to you if you find yourself in a pointy environment, with no hope of rescue.
I use them in two ways:
- a trick to trigger discussion and refinement of stories
- a way to prevent overloading a team in the long haul
In a sense, points are an artefact of the way work is fed into the team: batched vs streamed; owned by the team vs thrown at the team. If your team has sufficient control over how stories are generated, and how they are delivered, you may be in a position to skip these debates altogether.
Slicing & Dicing 🔗
It would be nice if stories were just big enough to be valuable, and consistent enough to be predictable. Unfortunately we do not always find ourselves with such control over our fates. I have found it useful to use story point discussion as a tool to encourage discussion which might not otherwise take place. If, say, a story is collectively estimated to be three points, the team can discuss ways to whittle down the scope to two points or even one point. The result must still have value of course.
What Are Points Anyway? 🔗
Every now and then someone asks, what is the conversion rate from story points to hours. Unfortunately the value of this is more or less zero. One can calculate an average time per point after the fact, but it is meaningless. One cannot usefully compare the number of points between teams, or even within the same team over an extended period of time. It’s much too sensitive to internal and external conditions. Jumps in velocity can be meaningful, but the actual numbers less so.
But it is still a useful threshold to quickly guess how much a team can bite off the next round of work.
Consider the ever-popular trade off between scope, quality and time:
In this sense, the average velocity, by which I mean the average number of points per iteration over the last few iterations, represents the average workload at which this team with its current composition can maintain this level of quality without burnout. Velocity is the tipping point at which the triangle tips over.