On Story Points
User stories and story points are often used as a technique to define requirements and estimate work by Scrum teams. This article explains why it is not a good practice to use story points as an estimation tool with planning poker.
User stories and story points are often used as a technique to define requirements and estimate work by Scrum teams. This article explains why it is not a good practice to use story points as an estimation tool with planning poker.
There is plenty to fret about when you are running or on an agile team, but your measure of estimation should be one of them. In fact, despite what you may have heard from consultants or others, Scrum is not prescriptive about any particular estimation measure, let alone story points. Many practitioners support story points and it has been very in vogue for a while now, you should do whatever you and your team feels most comfortable with.
The default use of an “estimate-driven” approach is pervasive in software development efforts. While estimates can be useful, it is worthwhile to scrutinize our use of estimates, and to seek better ways to manage the development of software when estimates are not appropriate.
Metrics are an important part of Agile project management approaches like Scrum. One of the most used measures to estimate the amount of work are the story points. In this small article, Pedro Gustavo Torres explains what they are, why you need them and how to use them.
There’s a debate raging in the Agile world around the #NoEstimate concept: should we estimate, or not? Lost in the noise are more important questions: When should we estimate, and why? When should we not estimate, and why not?
Budget-based project management is an alternative to classic estimates that has some following in the Agile community. In their book “Fifty Quick Ideas to Improve your User Stories”, Gojko Adzic and David Evans, discusses how using a budget instead of estimates can help to deliver better projects.
Estimates are part of our daily live. Every single day we ask and answer questions like: “when will it be done?”, “how much does it cost?” and use that “data” to plan the future of our projects. Some of us using rigorously formalised processes with heaps of Excel sheets, some applying more agile methods like planning poker. While doing that, we do not realise how estimates could be harmful!
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