Story Points Correlating to Time in Status

[Dave Stewart]

Hi. I'm working with a team that is new to the concept of story points and would rather estimate time for stories. Rather than force the idea of story point estimation upon them I agreed that we would come up with a scale of range of days to story points and use that for estimates.

Example:

• 1 SP = <= 1 day
• 2 SP = 1 to 2 days of development
• ...
• 13 SP = more than 10 days

What I want to do now is see how accurate their story points were versus the number of days they spent on development and use this as a jumping off point for a discussion. Either the team is correct and their estimates generally reflect reality (i.e. capture development time and externalities that required additional effort) or my hypothesis that their time-based estimates don't factor in effort that lies outside of hands-on-keyboard coding activities (i.e. external dependencies, creative problem-solving, learning new patterns, etc.)

Any suggestions on how to derive this from looking at issues? What I really want to do is measure the days from when an issue is moved out of To-Do and into Done and compare that with the Story Points.