Story Points in Agile- Lifecycle & Benefits

Whenever you plan a road trip, do you reach destination within the time as stated by Navigation tools? Or do you consider halts for a quick freshen up at the roadside cafe, fueling up the car or fixing those punctured trye at the worst !!

Software development is also like the exciting road journey that has many surprises and shocks as we hop in the bus! Abiding by the estimates as planned in the beginning of the project is like a fairytale that would rarely be true because whenever we estimate a user story/task, we mostly estimate in man hours/ man days considering the time it will take to develop and seldom we consider the effort that would be consumed to brain- storm, try and catch the right technique and approach to develop the solution. There could also be other risks that would float on the surface only when the fire is lit.

And all these challenges form a bottleneck when we are reach a situation where the Delivery Managers have a hard time justifying delays in the Project delivery. Its mostly because we overlooked or lost sight of the complexities and risks associated with the tasks when we were estimating the tasks in Man Days/ Man Hours.

For the beginners, Before we jump on Story Points, its essential to understand the concept of User Story. User story is a unit of software requirement broken down into an understandable format. In an agile project, all the requirements are elaborated in form a User Story under the format:

"As a [type of user], I want [an action] so that [benefit/value]."

For eg- As a first time user, I want to be able to signup so that I can access the Mobile App.

Once the User Stories are finalized and confirmed, its imperative for the Development Team to begin estimating the efforts for each User Story, one of the most conventional methods of effort estimation has been time bound estimation through Man Days/Man Hours/Milestone assessment and there is no denial that it one of the quickest approach towards the roadmap but there is a downside -

Time Based estimates sweep important factors (like - Complexity, Risks, Uncertainty)under the carpet leading to delays in delivery, chaos and frustration among stake holders and business.

Additionally there is a crucial aspect worth noting that Time based estimates are mostly dependent on sonority and efficiency of Individuals. While Mr Champion takes 2 days to write a complex Stored Procedure, Our Junior developer might quote 5 days to work on the same complex Stored Procedure.

While Story Points Estimation is the ideal remedy to all the challengers anticipated during Time Based Estimation.

Story Point Estimation Life Cycle

Groom the Team

Scrum Master & Product manager must ensure that the software development team strongly understands the concept of story points and the factors to be considered while estimating the user stories through Story Points

Story Size: Team should be able to contemplate the efforts needed for a specific task as every project is different, Adding 50 fields all text boxes should be easier that adding 50 fields on the UI each of its own type - Text, Time, location, sum check, weight, volume etc.

Risks & Uncertainty- Most of the times, you identify risks associated with the tasks only when you begin to work on it and then you realize it was not as easy as it appeared to be. There have been many such scenarios in Developers job where they were convinced that they only have to copy data from source to another as data structure is uniform but they face multiple issues like the data was incorrectly mapped, client did not provide enough details, SAP connection was not setup and a lot of time and efforts are wasted in this course, resulting to delay in delivery.

Complexity- Sometimes it becomes difficult to keep the engine running with new additions into the project, even though the feature works well in the individual setup. That's when we face the complex scenarios of software development which remains unaccounted when we only focus on estimating time based efforts for the task alone.

Create a Story Point Matrix

Story Point Matrix is a visual representation of assigning user points to features/ user stories.

Every User Point has a score defined on the basis of Complexity, Risks, Time consumed to develop the requirement.

These estimation scores are created using either linear scale (1,2,3,4,5…) or Fibonacci sequence series (0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13…)

Host Plan a Poker Meeting

Now that team understands the concept of User Points, their significance and the matrix to estimate the story points against user story/feature, Its time to host the brain storming session where all the developers are given set of cards with the score units and then each user story is presented to the board for a detailed discussion.

After the discussion, all contributors are asked to reveal their score cards at the same time if the score matches then the point is assigned to the user story otherwise they discuss further to achieve consensus.

Not to forget - Plan a poker session must take place after prioritization of backlog and before sprint kick off

Plan Project Schedule

After the team defines story points for all the requirements successfully, they work towards sprint planning, This is the time to pick either maximum number of low story points or less number of high story points or a mix of both.

Towards the end of first sprint, Team should be capable of contemplating Sprint velocity (number of story points covered per sprint)

Once the team completes its first sprint, its best advised to regroup and take part in sprint retrospective to identify the unexpected project bottleneck and also conclude if the story points estimation was done correctly, If needed the team should not hesitate in re estimating remaining User Stories after all Agile is all about continuous improvement.

Once the team decides on the Sprint velocity, it could be justifiably conveyed that how many sprints are needed to complete the development.

Benefits of Story Points Estimation

By now, it should be evident that story point estimation is the most accurate technique for assessing effort. Below are the key benefits of using story point in agile world:

Realistic Targets- Since Story points focus on efforts and not time, good weightage is given to complexities and risks associated with the task, fostering a more realistic and less stressful approach to project planning.

Team collaboration- Story Points is a team estimated technique hence reducing the focus on individual productivity leading to a collective sense of responsibility with the team.

Improved Transparency with Stakeholder- As the stakeholders are given the timeline considering the complexity and accounted risks, communication with stakeholder getter clearer, which aids in managing expectations and communication about project progress.

Risk Mitigation- Story point estimation encourages teams to consider and discuss potential risks and complexities, leading to a more comprehensive understanding of the project and better risk management.

Continuous Improvement- Through retrospective meetings, teams can analyze how well their estimates align with actual outcomes, leading to continuous improvement in estimation accuracy over time.

Conclusion

In summary, the use of story points in Agile development contributes to more effective planning, increased team collaboration, and improved adaptability to changing project requirements. For the beginners it might seem to be a little complicated in beginning but the moment teams get acclimate to this new technique, entire management gets onboarded to a new world where the estimates are more accurate. We at MAST Consulting are fully functional with story points estimation and time based estimates is narrative from the past.

Do contact us for helping you and your team!!

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