What’s the Story? What’s the Point?
Story points.
We recently made the switch to using the story point system and the most difficult thing to explain to the developer was the point of the whole thing. They were used to estimating tasks in terms of hours – a system which was never accurate and lead to utter disarray in terms of unfinished, half-finished, and poorly-finished tasks.
What goes through a developer’s mind when he tries to estimate how many hours a task will take? This:
- How many stored procedures will I need to write? How long does it take me to write one?
- How long to create the new page for it?
- How long to implement data filters and sorting?
- How much time do I need to make new tables?
- How much time for putting it all together?
And, in the end, they’d come up with some relatively random number like 13 hours or 8 hours. “What about testing?” I’d say.
“Oh and two or three hours for testing.” They all claimed.
Bill and Bob would estimate 13 hours for the task. Alice and Alicia would estimate 8. Fred would say 20.
And you know what we’d do? We’d take an average and say that’s how much work the ticket needed. It’s shameful, but that’s what we’d do. And would have continued to do, if we hadn’t woken up one day and said “this just isn’t working.”
Incoming – story points.
We understood eventually that this was some way of comparing scope of tasks, and not an actual measurement of anything. We understood that by understanding the scope in this way we could get a ‘feeling’ about how much work could be completed. We didn’t understand why Fibonacci sequence is used, nor what we could use as a medium-scope task to compare others too. But, we gave it a try.
First, to help developers understand what story points were, the S.M. ran an exercise, where animals in a zoo had to be assigned story points. The exercise broke down under relentless questioning about small details, but the general concept was understood.
Now we’re using story points to estimate stories for addition to the sprint backlog. This is what goes through the developer’s mind now:
- Is it smaller or larger than the 8-point task we all agreed on?
- How much larger is it? Is it less than twice the size?
- How many of the 2-point tasks could I complete in the same amount of time it would take me to complete this task?
- Where’s my beer?
You can clearly see that the process requires less thought, and more ‘feeling’.
One of the ways to keep a developer happy is to remove his need to think independently, and story points take one more step towards achieving this.
