What's the point in a story point?

Part 1: talking of the point
















 Story points are estimates of effort as influenced by the amount of work, complexity, risk and uncertainty (https://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/what-are-story-points). When we estimate with story points, we assign a point value to each item. The raw values we assign are unimportant. What matters is the relative values. A story that is assigned a 2 should be twice as much as a story that is assigned a 1. It should also be two-thirds of a story that is estimated as 3 story points.

Not delving into the details of how to estimate and what these numbers should be (linear vs. non-linear series or Fibonacci numbers), the focus of this post is to discuss how these points affect the life of a scrum team (development team, scrum master & product owner).

A story adds “value” by delivering functionality that the business has asked for, and can/will use depending on whether the story is a part of potentially shippable product increment (and whether the business has requested the increment to be made available in production or not). Product backlog, a collection of stories in turn, delivers the “value as a whole” or “the product” to the market to get the business returns on their investment.

So the point here is, that a story point is “some value” to business in terms of functionality.

and the question is – What is the perception of our stakeholders about these points? And how does it affect the life of a scrum master/development team? My next post deals with these questions – so stay tuned!
Best,
Jasdev Singh (PMI-ACP, CSM)

https://in.linkedin.com/in/singhjasdev

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