I’ve noticed that a lot of people still have misconceptions about story point sizing (or T-shirt sizing, if you use that in the early stage of tickets).

These are two conversations that occasionally come up in my team:

1.

– What’s the story point for this user story?

– 3

– Okay… so how many hours is 3 story points?

2.

– What’s the story point for this user story?

– 5

– Is that for senior developers?

– Yes

– Then what’s the story point for junior developers?

– Hmm… 8

What do these two conversations have in common? Yep, they both treat story points as if they’re just hours in disguise. It’s like using kilometers only because your are told not to use meters.

Let’s get this straight: story points don’t give you an exact number. They tell you whether one thing is more complex and risky than another thing. It’s a shared language. They’re work focused. They don’t change just because a different person does the work.

“But my boss wants an estimate in hours”

This is the grey area you have to address:

  • As a development team, you’re not 100% sure how long something will take, because there are always unknowns.
  • As a manager or investor, they want a delivery date and a cost estimate so they know much money they’re spending to get it done, which is fair.

This is when you start forecasting, using historical data. Everyone should agree that the number (or preferably the range) is just an educated guess (Of course, still, part of your job is to reduce as many unknowns as possible so that the guess gets closer to reality).

Within the development team, story points should help with things like:

  • “This looks similar to that other 5-point story we did last sprint”
  • “This sprint feels like too much. We should let some stories go”
  • “Do we really want to pull in another 5-point story, or should we play it safe?”
  • “Why do some 3-point tickets consistently take longer than 8-point ones? Let’s pause and see what’s going on.”

So if you often find yourself having conversations like the ones at the top of this post, chances are you’re either using story points wrong or not benefiting from them at all.