How do you facilitate effective story point estimation sessions with your team?

Let's be realistic here. Often points are just a proxy for a time scale when people are estimating, just not calendar based. Collectively, they are capturing the total productivity of the team each sprint.

??Story points (ARE NOT EQUAL TO) number of days ??Story points (ARE NOT EQUAL TO) number of MANDAYS ??Story points (ARE NOT EQUAL TO) everyone Hence first step is to come at a common point as a team to understand what is the measurement called story point!

Having tried various point scales, my most preferred has been 1 to 5. Anything that was a 5 needed to be broken down more before being added to a sprint. Having only 1 to 4 used made sizing more accurate by limiting the options.

Fibonacci sequence can really help you out in early stages when you are adopting story points - to understand the scale - but I would rather stick to smaller scale like T-shirt sizes - for example if you need XXS (to small effort) maybe it is not worthy to be by it self a work item to estimate and can be done as part of another effort/work item, or if you need XXL (to large effort) then you may want to break that effort into smaller once to have closer consensus with your team.

As a leader and product owner, planning poker creates an amazing opportunity to be inclusive. When there isn't agreement, you can choose who to start the discussion with, whether it's someone at the high end, the low end, or someone who can set a baseline with the middle. Even when everyone agrees, someone may be chosen to discuss why. Everyone has an opportunity to participate and build a shared understanding within the team. Lastly, it's a really good onboarding experience for someone new to the team.

Planning poker is great way to start understanding how to put weight on your story points, however one thing to be aware is to not fall for the same story estimation for every project or product you work on. It will really depend on the team size and the type of project/product that will drive how you are going measure the weight of your story points. So make sure you tweak and adopt correct story estimation in the early project/product sessions.

I have found poker planning to be the most effective way to improve estimation within a team. Building consensus and understanding how the point value was determined for many stories in one session provides the team a lot of insight and feedback in real time.

In my experience, I have seen best performers listing a most complex work as two pointers and extremely lazy candidates extract their time for a small single word change as a five pointer! Both may be appropriate but it makes sense only when an agile coach/scrum master reviews them! Hence group of people measuring without Scrum Master review on story point are merely a bunch of people aiming at something. But a solid Scrum Master makes a big difference in reviewing story points to make a big impact in final outcome. Some best Scrum Masters I have seen in recent years: Swarn Garg, Rupali Sharma