Planning Poker

Story Points and Man Hours – When To Use Them and Why?

The debate about why story points why not time goes on wherever I go for conducting coaching workshops. Hence I thought of sharing few more thoughts today.

Previously we had sizing techniques like Function Point Analysis, but it was tough to understand/implement by everyone and hence was restricted to experts ONLY. But estimation is an activity to be done by people who are going to work on it. Hence a simpler sizing technique was needed so that everyone(developers, testers) can understand and use it easily.

Story points is a very powerful sizing technique. It has various advantages as I mentioned in my earlier articles.

Story points estimation using planning poker which is based on Wideband Delphi method helps to arrive at consensus based estimates using collective intelligence – Wisdom of the Crowds.

Agile Estimation: 9 Reasons Why You Should Use Story Points

by Avienaash Shiralige 12 Comments

A common question about estimating with points is, “Why Points? Why not in Days? Finally I need to do planning so I need to convert points to Days. Why this additional level of indirection?

In-fact I find story points as a good distraction to the team. Let me go over why having this “additional layer of indirection” provided by story points can be very useful.

Agile Estimation : 8 Steps to Successful Story Point Estimation

by Avienaash Shiralige 28 Comments

In Story sizing, team does a comparative analysis between all of the stories for the project. Let’s look at the typical story sizing steps.

For each story to be sized, do the following as a team(Product Owner, Core Scrum team including developers, testers & scrum master).