The point of story points

Their value is not in estimation

Like many constructs in modern Agile, story points have a defined purpose and everyone tries to use them how they are supposed to be used, but they never quite deliver on what they are supposed to do.

Story points are designed to be a measure of the effort involved in completing a feature, but putting numbers against things rarely yields a better estimation than a team’s gut feel. Agile teams instinctively know whether a list of stories is too big or too small to complete in a sprint. Teams can fill up their capacity based on story points and know they can do more, or know it’s not going to happen, but they go with the numbers because that’s what the company’s methodology says.

But even if story points are not an effective way for a team to plan, they do serve a valuable purpose.

Story points force teams to agree on the scope of a story, ensure a common understanding of what’s involved beyond the requirements and most importantly they bring out unconscious assumptions. Rarely does one member of a team consider everything involved and rarely does anyone avoid making assumptions. The moment teams question why one person thinks “it’s a 3” and one person thinks “it’s an 8” the value of it is realised. Most of the team assumed our existing test tools can do this when they cannot, or only one team member realised we can re-use a previous piece of work.

This effect is exacerbated when team members have defined roles (a developer, a tester, back-end, front-end), and an individual is less equipped to understand the full scope of delivering a feature.

Requirements can make simple things sound hard or complex things sound easy, and until a team’s assumptions and biases are brought to the foreground then you’ll never know which it is.

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