Collaboration & Process › Estimation & Planning

Story Points

Relative effort estimates instead of hours.

Also known as: story point, points

Story points are a unit for estimating the relative size of a backlog item. A story estimated at 5 points is bigger than one estimated at 2, and the team agrees on how much bigger. The number combines the amount of work, its complexity and how much uncertainty there is.

Story points deliberately avoid hours. People are poor at predicting hours, and a point estimate doesn’t pretend to be a date. Teams usually calibrate with reference stories: a small story that everyone agrees is “2”, for example, so new estimates are compared against something known.

Reference:  "Add a new field to the profile form" = 2
New item:   "Add a new field to the profile form and the API" = 3

Story points tell a team how much fits in a sprint, based on what it has finished recently. They’re not a measure for comparing teams, and they lose their meaning when used as a performance target.

The classic mistake is converting points into hours and then holding the team to those hours. Once that happens, people inflate their estimates to look safe, and the numbers stop meaning anything. Planning poker is one common way to agree on a point value.