Sharing an experience on Story pointing.

Over the years I have worked with many teams, a few companies and many people struggling with Story Points.

When I started out as a Scrum Master many years ago, I too had difficulty explaining to my teams what Story Points are and how to work with them. Basically the Scrum Guide says that it is not hours of work, but instead based on the difficulty of a PBI/User Story, but how to quantify this?

What is easy for a senior Dev can be difficult for a junior, but as time and knowledge progress this should align more and more.

So how did I eventually find a Way of Working with my teams which was understood and agreed upon by everyone?

It’s not that hard actually, you need a Retro or whiteboard session with everyone in the team present, including the PO. Then you take the Backlog (or a generic and recurring Issue) and together decide which PBI/US is the easiest generic one on the board and that Ladies and Gentlemen will be the “founding” Issue/Change, and this will then get 1 Story Point. Describe it and store it.

After this it is back to the backlog (or a list of generic Issues) and find one that is thought of to be somewhat more difficult (twice would be nice), discuss it, agree and that will be 2 SPs (Story Points)

After this you can continue to find and describe as many as you want according the Fibonacci series as a reference set, but my advice would be to stop at 13 because anything bigger would most likely not fit in a Sprint and should, if possible, be chopped into smaller pieces to deliver value more quickly as Scrum would work best.

After some time using the described Issues, team members will quickly be able to story point without this reference set.

Having said all this, it is not a must do, but it might help make it easier, and SPs track difficulty only, not speed, not US turnover and it is therefore not meant as a reporting Metric.

Using SPs calculated in hours runs the risk of it being used as a velocity tracker or reporting metric to management which might not be a desired thing to do.

So I hope this will help someone, and good luck Story Pointing.