Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Advantage of using Story Points instead of hours

Using story points for estimating user-stories in helpful because it encourages us to use 'relative sizing' and estimating the 'size of work' and not the real effort required.

Mike Cohn has given a good analogy by relating this concept to running a trail. Two people can agree on the fact that the trail is 5 miles long, but one may take 30 mins and the other may take 45 mins.

During the Planning Poker game, each developer is given cards with numbers 1,2,3,5,8 on them. Then the Scrum Master and Product Owner take the effort sizing from all developers to arrive at a consensus.

The Fibonacci scale is quite popular for estimating the user-story or epic size, as there is sufficient difference between the numbers to prevent confusion. For e.g. If the scale is sequential, then there would be a debate around sizing of 6 or 7 or 8. But a Fibonacci scale, makes it easy to relative sizing. 

No comments:

Post a Comment