Story Points and Time Tracking together like PB&J?

Rob Horan

Atlassian (and others) have said "Estimates are often used for measuring the size of a backlog and calculating velocity. Tracking is often the burndown of hours used during the sprint. This helps make sure a team are on track to complete the stories during the sprint period.

It’s common for teams to estimate tasks in story points, then track those tasks using hours. "

I apologize for the simple statement, but how does a story point have any relevance? 

For example, someone adds 4 points to an issue and someone else adds 10 points to a different issue, and they both got done in a sprint.  How do I know which was on track and which was off?  Were they both completed on time?  Is the only time metric of interest the sprint? 

I just don't understand the value of story points.

This ties into my lack of understanding of the value of a story to begin with.  Why are we using stories and not issue types like enhancement, feature, etc?  Isn't story just a vague catch-all for any kind of work?  How do we search for issues based on the kind of work performed?

Trudy P Claspill

There are many resources on the internet that talk about agile methodologies and the role of Story Points in them.

Here is an article from Atlassian on the topic of story point estimation.

https://www.atlassian.com/agile/project-management/estimation

Here's one from another source:

https://www.easyagile.com/blog/user-story-points/

 

In my experience Story Points are used as a way to do gross estimation of the effort to complete work, and ideally the team works together to estimate the stories so that there is a common understanding of the "effort" associated with a given story point number. The story points are used also to assess the relative effort; a story with 3 points should take less effort than a story with 6 points. You can use as few or as many numbers as you want. 

 

On the topic of "story" vs. other types of issues, Jira supports the creation of additional issue types at the same issue hierarchy level as "story". If you want to create additional issue types to more clearly delineate the "type" of work, you certainly can do that. Alternately you could specify the "type" of work using a Component or Label value.

Digressing a bit - keep in mind the issue hierarchy in Jira is simple:

Epics > other issues like Story and Bug and ones you want to create > Sub-tasks

If you want to define additional issue types you can do that at the same level as Story, and at the same level as Sub-tasks. If you want to extend the hierarchy, that requires additional features either from the Jira Cloud Premium subscription (the Advanced Roadmaps feature) or from third party apps.

 

Use of story points and time estimation/tracking is a broad topic. I would encourage you to review internet resources available for training on agile methodologies to get addition information on the topic.