A story point is an abstract measure of effort necessary to accomplish a user narrative used in agile project management and development to assess the complexity of completing it. In basic words, a narrative point is a number that informs the team of the tale's difficulty level. The difficulty may be defined as the amount of complexity, dangers, and work required.
At product backlog grooming sessions, story points, a type of relative estimating, is generally conducted, and the product backlog is assessed by the team in charge of the actual development and testing work.
The team does not estimate the precise time needed to develop the feature while estimating narrative points. Instead, they assess the task's complexity. The Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8,...) is commonly employed for this purpose. At initially, everyone on the team can evaluate the work based on their intuition and first impressions. If the disparities are considerable, the team members with the highest and lowest scores must explain their results to the rest of the team. The highest score is taken into consideration after the second round of estimates.
I'll use the same example as before:
PM: This button needs to be added to the main page. Are you prepared to make an estimate? Let's get started. 3, 2, 1... let's go!
PM: All right, we've got three, five, two, and eight. John, What made you give it an eight?
John: It must be added to numerous screens, among other things.
PM: Paul, why are there just two of you?
Paul: After all, it's just a button, and we have plenty of those in the app.
PM: All right, one more time. 1, 2, 3... Go!
PM: All right, three, two, and three. So, the score is a three.
A task point is similar to a story point. All of the teams I spoke with (or spoke with later) wanted to utilize a more granular unit than their narrative points.
A team that completed 10 narrative points every sprint, for example, may complete 80 task points per sprint.
Teams just desired a smaller, more granular unit to keep track of progress. It'd be like a speedometer in a car reporting speed in light years per hour. That would make it difficult for me to tell whether I'm going too fast.
For many teams, introducing a more granular unit was a smart idea. After all, it's difficult to track daily progress using story points for a team that, say, completes seven story points in two weeks. Many story elements are simply too vast to be helpful in this context.
Why not use Task Points instead?
As a result, task points have no clear benefit over hours. Task points, on the other hand, have all of the disadvantages of narrative points:
Many team members are unfamiliar with the notion.
The requirement for establishing baseline values against which relative estimating can be performed The fact that estimations drift with time in contrast to their original relative values is a source of worry.
Individuals with varying talents, experience levels, and backgrounds can agree on a relative estimate for work using story points.
Let's pretend that an octopus and I are both estimating the work required to wash my automobile.
The octopus has four times my number of arms. So the octopus can supposedly wash my car four times faster than I can. (I warned you it was a ridiculous example.) Consider that for a moment.)
However, the octopus will wash any automobile four times faster than I can. So, the octopus and I can agree that my two-seat automobile is worth five narrative points, while a larger car is worth ten.
So, even though the octopus is probably much faster at washing cars than I am, narrative points allow the octopus and I to agree on a lot of story points.
A lot of people have queries regarding Agile Story Points.
It may take some time to become used to using Story Points, but once you do, they may save you a lot of time in your operations. Here's a brief Q&A regarding Story Points to assist you to work through any difficulties you might have.
Is it possible to substitute hours for Story Points?
If you want to estimate in hours, you don't have to utilize Story Points while conducting your Agile project. What you should not do, however, is compare Story Points to their equivalence in hours (e.g., 13 Story Points should not equal 13 hours simply because the numbers are the same). The aim of utilizing Story Points to ease the estimate process is defeated.
Is it possible to change Story Points during Sprints?
No, even if you discover during the Sprint that the original estimations were inaccurate, your allotted story points should remain the same. The sprint review or sprint retrospective is the best opportunity to handle these modifications since this is when you can explain why particular activities required more or less work than expected and keep this information in mind for future planning.
Should I re-estimate the Story Points for a job that has been pushed to the following Sprint?
It's preferable not to change the estimated Story Points associated with a task once you've started it, even if you're transferring it to the following Sprint. It may be tempting to increase the Story Point estimate if you performed half the work in the time given, but it's preferable to discuss this during the Retrospective. You could discover that a work like this should be split into two halves, allocated to two distinct teams, or planned differently next time. Apply what you've learned to future tasks rather than adjusting the Story Points on existing assignments.