Getting Started with Story Points
Work needs to be estimated so that it can be scheduled and organised. Time is the most obvious method for this estimation. But time can be hard to estimate sometimes, and how granular do you make your estimates? To the day? To the hour? Half hour? A competing method for this estimation is to estimate effort. But how do we estimate effort? This is where story points come in. Story point estimation assigns a value to a task to indicate it's complexity. The higher the number, the more complex the task. What numbers should we choose for our range of story points? That's entirely up to you. You could use the numbers: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. This type of series works fine for the smaller numbers - 2 is twice the size of 1, so a task assigned 2 story points is twice as complicated as a task assigned a 1 etc. But this series of numbers falls down at the higher numbers in the series - 10 is only a ninth bigger than 9. So for the higher numbers in the series its much harder to