When you equate story points with time...


Agile becomes fragile! When you are "doing" agile (most likely because it's in vogue) but have not come out of the "sequential" SDLC execution syndrome or the traditional waterfall way of thinking and executing a project, you are most likely headed for a disaster!

 Of many things that may or will go wrong, is the estimation of work. The traditional methods of estimation like function-point analysis helped us answer the question - "how long (or duration) will a piece of work take to complete?". On the contrary, Agile keeps it simple and takes a minimalistic approach to estimation. In my opinion, estimation in agile is no rocket science as long as you are clear with the basics and understand "what story points are" and how to use them. Visit my blog post on story points for an understanding.
Story Points vs. Time (Person Days)
Mike Cohn shares a mantra that makes estimation easy - "Estimate size, measure velocity, derive duration".

 Size and complexity of a user story (or busness requirement) is measured in Story Points and the sum of story points of all the user stories accepted by the Product Owner accounts for the "velocity" of the team. 


Simply put, story points are a relative and unitless measure of size and complexity of a user story.

 The emphasis of this post is to find an answer to the question - "Why estimate in story points?" Business stakeholders who have been in organizations for decades altogether understand estimates in terms of time - days/months etc. The bigger question really is - "How does a backlog estimate in terms of Story Points translate to how long will it take for the team to deliver the backlog, given that requirements, technology and a lot of various other factors infuencing estimates are bound to change?" After all, we are agile (or at least trying to be) and embrace change for the competitive advantage of business!

 Is it all that convoluted? The answer is NO. Continue reading to unravel the answers to these questions and I bet you'll say estimating in Story Points and arriving at a duration  can't be any easier than this!

Best,

Jasdev Singh (PMI-ACP®, CSM®, CSP-SM™, ICP-ACC)
https://in.linkedin.com/in/singhjasdev

Comments

  1. Jasdev SinghAugust 22, 2019 at 9:15 AM

    Continue reading here - https://practicing-agile.blogspot.com/2019/08/how-does-backlog-size-estimate-in-story.html

    ReplyDelete

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