Things to keep in mind when estimating efforts using story points

Story points are the most common way in Agile to estimate a piece of work in the product backlog. Their value provides an idea around the efforts needed to implement a piece of work. This effort needed, is a crucial factor while prioritizing something for development.

Prioritizing a product backlog item requires finding a sweet spot between:

When estimations go bad, they affect ‘When’ a feature or improvement in the product rolls out. This has a big impact on profitability and desirability. A delay in delivery may end up in the product losing the intended customer attention. And, also add an overhead to the development cost.

Often while estimating efforts for an item in backlog, development teams measure effort by the amount of the ‘Time’ needed. This is the biggest mistake which teams make. In such cases, the story points represent days or hours needed to develop a piece of work. This may work very well if we have already encountered something exactly similar. However, this is a very risky way to estimate when dealing with new and unknown challenges.

The ‘Time’ needed to complete a piece of work is a variable. It can change depending on the skill and experience level of the developer working on the problem. For the same piece of work, the time needed will be different for an experienced developer and for a beginner. ‘Time’ also does not take into account the real world challenges that may arise due to interrupts. Take, for instance, the developer may be away for a few days.

Moreover, this way of estimation emphasizes a lot on an individual. In Agile, its all about a team delivering the highest possible value to the customer. Our efforts and work should also pave the way for the improvement of the team as a whole and not just for an individual’s.

As a team, our effort estimation for any work should represent its complexity. It is a more natural way to estimate efforts for any work in the product backlog. A development team can…

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