<aside> <img src="/icons/bookmark-outline_red.svg" alt="/icons/bookmark-outline_red.svg" width="40px" /> OUTLINE
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“Half-done Is not done. Anything that’s in process costs money and energy without delivering anything.” - Jeff Sutherland
Understanding the intricacies of story points, planning poker, and burndown charts can significantly enhance your team's productivity, improve estimation accuracy, and ensure high-quality results. In this chapter, we will delve into these strategies and techniques, exploring how they can boost the accuracy of your estimations and foster a culture of collaboration within your team.
In the scrum world, story points play a crucial role in measuring scrum performance. They serve as a compass, guiding teams through the complexities of product development by offering a nuanced method of estimating effort. Unlike traditional estimation methods that solely focus on time, story points take into account the intricacies of tasks, embracing dimensions such as complexity, uncertainty, and risk. This comprehensive approach allows teams to confidently navigate the unpredictable software development landscape, ensuring greater control and success.
The true value of story points lies in their ability to foster a shared understanding within the team, promoting collaboration and open dialogue. They act as a catalyst for meaningful conversations about work, encouraging team members to share their perspectives and reach a consensus on the effort required to complete tasks. By engaging in this process, teams enhance the accuracy of their estimations and strengthen their overall cohesion and mutual respect. In essence, story points are more than just a tool for estimation; they serve as a guiding light that illuminates the path to successful product delivery and team growth, empowering teams to achieve their full potential.
Story points are a unit of measure scrum teams use to estimate the effort required to implement a given piece of work, typically a feature or user story. They quantify the time it will take and the complexity, risk, and uncertainty involved.
[Complexity]: Think of story points as a scale for work complexity. For instance, if you were asked to move boxes, a small package might be 1 point, a larger box could be 2 points, and an enormous, heavy box might be 13 points. The numbers don't relate to a specific measure (like weight or size), but they give you a relative comparison between tasks.
The numerical values of story points can vary, but many teams use a Fibonacci-like sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.). This sequence reflects the inherent uncertainty in estimating more extensive, more complex work—the bigger the task, the more uncertainty around it; thus, the estimates grow exponentially, not linearly.
[Velocity]: Over time, teams develop a sense of their 'velocity' - the number of story points they can typically complete in one sprint (a set work period, usually 2-4 weeks). This helps them predict how much work they can do in future sprints.
[Communication]: Story points facilitate effective communication across teams. Using story points, team members can develop a shared understanding of the complexity and effort associated with a task, which can help streamline planning sessions and improve cross-team coordination.
Over time, consistent use of story points can help teams establish a universal language that facilitates better communication. This shared understanding can help team members identify potential roadblocks and work together more efficiently to overcome them.
[Accuracy]: Using story points can help teams identify patterns and trends in their work, leading to process improvements and more accurate estimations of effort and time. By providing a more accurate picture of what is required to complete a task, teams can better manage expectations and deliver high-quality results on time.
[Reference]: Teams often use reference stories to help them estimate story points. A reference story is a user story that has already been calculated and can be used as a benchmark for evaluating new levels. It is important to note that reference stories should be chosen carefully to ensure they are similar in complexity to the latest reports being estimated. Having multiple reference stories to choose from can help reduce bias and improve the accuracy of the estimates.
Planning Poker is a consensus-based, gamified technique predominantly used in agile project management for estimating work complexity and timeboxing. The essence of this technique lies in its collaborative nature, engaging team members in a discussion to reach a mutual understanding of the task's complexity and the effort required.
In planning poker, each team member gets a set of cards with values corresponding to the potential points that could be assigned (such as 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.). Team members "bet" by placing a face-down card, representing their estimate for each user story. When everyone has placed their bet, the cards are revealed, and the team discusses the forecast, especially if there's a large discrepancy.
[Openness]: To allocate tasks effectively, promote open dialogue among team members. Trust in the collaborative decision-making process allows the team to derive accurate estimates for studies by harnessing the collective wisdom of its members.