Are Story points Rules or Tactics employed by Scrum?

What are Story Points?

Story Points are a unit of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort that will be required to fully implement a product backlog item or any other piece of work. Story Points are about uncertainty, complexity, or risk. Uncertainty, complexity, and risk are all factors that influence effort, but each of them alone is not enough to determine effort.

When we estimate with Story Points, we assign a point value to each item. The raw values we assign are unimportant. What matters are the relative values.

Story Points are often seen as the obvious way to determine the complexity of a Product Backlog Item. Teams also use them to determine their velocity: the amount of (in this case) Story Points that a Scrum Team can finish within the Sprint.

Almost every Scrum Team uses Story Points, but not everyone is aware of the relationship it holds with the Scrum framework. 

Are Story Points rules or tactics of Scrum?

Even before getting to the debate, let us reach common grounds on what a tactic and a rule are all about.

Tactics: An action or strategy carefully planned to achieve a specific end. Tactics are the specific actions or steps we undertake designed to respond to a fast-changing reality to accomplish a particular goal.

Example: Tiki-Taka is a Spanish style of play in football characterized by short passing and movement, working the ball through various channels, and maintaining possession.

Example of Tiki-Taka ball possession tactic employed by the Spanish National Soccer Team

Listing a few examples for tactics with respect to Scrum framework is ‘Visualizing Progress’, ‘User Stories’, ‘Planning Poker’ and ‘Velocity’.

Rules: One of a set of explicit or understood regulations or principles governing conduct within a particular activity or sphere. In another way of defining, rules are instructions that tell you why you are allowed to do and what you are not allowed to do.

Example: The rules in football allow each team to have eleven players on the field at a time. Teams may substitute players between plays with no restrictions. Each team must start a play on their side of the ball.

Scrum framework remains intact with rules (not limited to) doing Sprint Retrospectives every Sprint, limiting the Daily Scrum within 15 minutes timebox every day, Developers* committing to Sprint Goals and not to individual Product Backlog Items (PBIs) in the Sprint.

Story Points are neither mentioned nor mandated part of the Scrum framework (Reference to the Scrum Guide: https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html). Yet, Story Points remains a powerful and useful tactic employed with the Scrum framework for:

·      Quickly estimating Product Backlog Items

·      Coming up with estimates without giving a specific time commitment

·      Embrace the uncertainty that comes along with the estimation

·      Accurate ‘enough’ to plan Sprints ahead

Why one has to gain clarity on whether ‘Story Points’ is a tactic or rule part of Scrum?

Scrum as a framework has a minimal set of roles, events, artifacts, and rules that hold everything together. But beyond those components and rules, there is a ton of space left to implement your own tactics and complementary practices along with Scrum.

None of the tenets of a framework are realized when we apply Scrum (blindly with no rationale) as

·      An all-inclusive, extensive approach

·      Set of recommendations (a combination of tactics and practices)

Remember every Product Backlog Item represented only as User Stories? Mandating Story Points for estimating Product Backlog Items?

None of these tactics when implemented blindly are going to work and get the actual outcomes of Scrum.

Actual outcomes? What are they?

Outcomes when Scrum well implemented are:

1.     Increase in Business value

2.    Decrease non-value-added waste and

3.    Manage risk exposure

Rules of Scrum when coupled with specific tactics (identified leaning on team’s Context & Rationale) yields the desired results – the outcomes for Scrum.

*Developers – The term ‘Development Team’ mentioned in Scrum Guide 2017 changed to ‘Developers’ since Nov 18th, 2020 with the recent Scrum Guide changes.

  Refer to the latest Scrum Guide here: https://www.scrumguides.org/scrum-guide.html