Story Pointing
- Andrew Padilla (Unlicensed)
This page describes the concept of Story pointing in Agile. Story pointing is a technique used in Agile Scrum teams to roughly quantify the level of effort involved in a story. It uses the Fibonacci sequence of numbers to assign the level of effort
Why Story Pointing?
Story pointing allows teams to fairly predictably quantify over time how long it may take to address a given backlog of stories using past performance of stories completed as a measure. This is often called the “BURN-DOWN” rate. In Jira , there are burn-down charts that visually depict this measure over time.
How Does it Work?
During Sprint Planning and/or backlog grooming, teams will predict how many points a new story should be assigned. Some team members may score it a low value (low effort) , while others may score a high value (large effort). This is fine as you come to reach consensus on the level of effort as the discussion ensues. One member who assigned a low value may have already seen an existing pattern that addresses the story that others do not. In a scenario where a team member who assigned a high story pointing outlier, it may be the case that they see complexity in achieving the story where others do not.
In most cases teams tend to point similarly in in the absence of good reasoning for outlier point assignment by a team member, the median value is typically chosen.
The Fibonacci Sequences Mapped to Approximate Level of Effort
1 point - easy. Maybe an hour or a couple of hours
2 points - pretty easy, maybe a day
3 points - maybe a couple of days
5 points - a little less than a week
8 points - ~ 1 week
13 points - a little more than one week
21 points - full two weeks required