Story points explained

Story points are the most common unit for planning poker, and the most misunderstood. A story point is not an hour or a day. It is a way of saying how big one piece of work is compared with another, so a team can plan without pretending to know exactly how long everything will take.

What goes into a story point

A point is one number that covers three things together:

• Effort: how much there is to do, including building, testing and reviewing.
• Complexity: how tricky the work is, such as awkward code, many moving parts or difficult rules.
• Uncertainty: how much the team doesn't know yet, such as an unfamiliar system or an unclear requirement.

Two stories with the same amount of typing can get very different points if one of them touches code nobody understands.

Setting your team's scale

1. Pick a reference story. Choose a small, well-understood story the team has finished and call it a 2 or a 3. Everyone should remember it.
2. Size new work against it. "Is this bigger or smaller than the reference? About twice as big?" Comparing is much easier than guessing hours.
3. Use a scale with gaps. Most teams use 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40 and 100. The gaps grow with size because big work is harder to size precisely.
4. Keep it stable. Don't change what a 3 means from sprint to sprint. The value of points comes from consistency.

Common mistakes

• Converting points to hours. As soon as "1 point = 4 hours", the team is estimating hours again, just with extra steps.
• Comparing teams. One team's 5 isn't another team's 5. Points only make sense within the team that gave them.
• Using points to judge people. If points become a target, estimates creep up and stop being useful for planning.
• Arguing over small differences. If the team is torn between 3 and 5, pick one and move on. The next story matters more.

Story points in EstimateIt

EstimateIt's Numbers cards are the usual story point scale, from 0 to 100, plus ? (I don't know enough), ∞ (too big, split it) and Pass. When the votes are revealed you see the average and median, and the facilitator picks the agreed number. The room adds the agreed points up as you go, and testers can give their own estimate alongside the developers'.

Common questions

What is a story point?

A unit for the relative size of a piece of work, combining effort, complexity and uncertainty. It compares one story with another instead of measuring time.

How many hours is one story point?

There is no fixed conversion. Points measure relative size, and how long a point takes varies by team and by story. Converting them to hours turns them back into time estimates.

Why do story points use the Fibonacci sequence?

The gaps between the numbers grow as the work gets bigger, matching how uncertainty grows. It stops teams arguing over differences too small to matter.

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