What is a story point ?
Posted by editor on November 13, 2007
Story point is a random measure used by Scrum teams. This is used to measure the effort required to implement a story.
In simple terms its a number that tells the team how hard the story is.
In most cases a story point range is
1,2,4,8,16 or X Small, Small, Medium, Large, Extra Large
It is a relative term and does not directly co relate to actual hours . Since story points have no relevance to actual hours, it makes it easy for scrum teams to think abstract about the effort required to complete a story.
This also creates a lot of confusion as most scrum masters who come from a PMP background relate this immediately to hours.
Story points do give some indication of how much time time was spent in a sprint.
Example lets say at the end of a 10 day sprint a team of 4 covers 40 story points.
10 days = 10 * 8 working hours = 80 hours. = 320 total hours as there are 4 developers.
That equated to 160 pairing hours.
160 divided by 40 = 4 hours pair hours per story point.
November 24, 2007 at 8:28 pm
One issue I’ve encountered in using hours as a measure of effort is, it can be very subjective when using for estimates. In Extreme Programming (XP), developers need to estimate the effort for the stories. The effort in hours could vary from developer to developer. We could attempt to overcome this issue by using story points which can be used as a relative measure between stories. After a few iterations, it would be possible to calculate the equivalent effort in hours per story point.
June 2, 2008 at 5:27 pm
Nice description of the story point…my team just started using SCRUM to manage our new product line and this post has really helped. Thanks!
September 23, 2008 at 9:13 am
8 working hours? They don’t eat, talk, think? Auch…