Are you estimating Story Points correctly?

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In the world of software development, story points play a pivotal role in managing workload, planning, and predicting product delivery. These abstract units help teams estimate the effort and complexity involved in completing a user story. However, determining their accuracy can be challenging.

This article delves into effective methods for estimating story points using the Time in Status add-on, a tool designed to enhance your insight into project metrics and streamline your agile processes.

 

Understanding Story Points

Story points are a metric used to estimate the effort required to fully implement a user story or product backlog item. Unlike hours or days, which can vary based on individual productivity, story points assess the relative effort and complexity in a technology-agnostic manner.

When estimating work using story points, it can be helpful to consider the following factors:

   🏋️ Effort: This includes all the work required to complete the task, including Quality Assurance (QA) as defined in your Definition of Done.

   🕸️ Complexity: Consider the number of elements involved, their interdependence, and the need for research.

   ⚠️ Risk: Estimate how much of the task is unknown or risky at the moment of estimating.

   💡 Experience: Consider the team's previous experience in completing similar tasks.

   🤝 Collaboration: Estimate the amount of cooperation required for the task within the team or with other parties.

If Story Points are not related to time, then how Time in Status can be useful for Sprints?

Great question! Even though story points do not directly correspond to specific amounts of time (as they represent complexity, effort, and risk rather than hours or days), understanding how time is spent during sprints can provide crucial insights for agile teams. The Time in Status add-on becomes particularly useful in this context by offering detailed analytics on the status of each issue within a sprint.

Let's analyze a real case study of a scrum master and how he found a problem in task estimation.

Here is pivot table of one team in Time and Status. 

Let's look at the table, namely at the problem with the tasks that were estimated as 3 story points. Completing 3 different tasks of 3 story points of the point took 1 hour, 22 hours and 46 hours.

We can conclude that such an assessment does not make practical sense and is a marker that the developers do not have an understanding of what to do in this task.

Usually, in such tasks, either 

• the size of the task is too large, or 
• there are unclear risks during the planning of the task.

That is, the score in the third quarter of the point in this team is given when they do not understand what to do.

These problematic tasks can also be the cause of intermittent sprint underruns, which can be seen on Team Velocity.

What should be done to correctly estimate tasks and make the team more predictable?

At the end of every sprint, you'll have more data and experience. We recommend the following steps to make the most of it:

• 📋 Update your story point sizing table with the latest information. As you gain more experience working with story points, your table may need some adjustments. The end of a Sprint is an ideal time to do this.
• 🏁 Check Team Velocity in Sprint Report and compare it to the previous Sprint. Is it about the same? Did you complete more story points? Discuss why your velocity may have increased or decreased during the retro and use the insights to make any necessary adjustments. This will help you ensure that you're still planning the right amount of work for your next sprint.

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Ready to enhance your agile practices and make your story points truly reflect the effort required? Try Time in Status today and see the difference accurate data can make in your project management efforts. 

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