Understanding Story Points and Relative Sizing for Work Estimates

How Do You Teach others About Story Points?

It’s nearly back-to-school time where I live. I can almost smell the new spiral notebooks and freshly sharpened pencils!
What are your back-to-school plans? Do any of them involve building your agile skills? I want to help. For the next six weeks, I’ll send a tip per week on common Scrum and agile topics, with three practical pointers for each. Every pointer includes a link to a blog or video for a more in-depth explanation.
Our first back-to-school topic is how to introduce story points to your team.
Tip # 1: Start with What Story Points Are
Story points abstract units of measure for expressing an estimate of the overall effort required to implement a product backlog item or any other piece of work. With story points, the raw values are meaningless. What matters is the ratio between the numbers.
Tip #2: Tell the Team the Main Benefit of Story Points
The main reason to use story points is that they allow team members with different skill levels to communicate about and agree on an estimate, because with story points it’s all relative.
Suppose you are a classically trained French chef. I, on the other hand, struggle to boil water. We are not going to chop an onion in the same amount of time. You’ll always go faster. So if we had to tell someone precisely how long it takes to chop an onion, we’d never agree on a number.
But we’re using story points. And because we are, we don’t have to agree on precise times, we just have to decide on the relative effort it will take to chop an onion.
So let’s imagine that we decide that chopping an onion is a 2–it’s not the easiest thing we could chop, but it’s not too difficult.
From there, we ask ourselves: how does chopping a pineapple compare to chopping an onion? We decide it’s about 2 times more effort to get a pineapple peeled, cored, and diced. So we agree to call it a 4.
We could have called the onion a 5. If we did, the pineapple would be a 10. The numbers don’t matter. The relationship between the numbers is all we care about.
Tip #3: Explain that Effort Considers Multiple Factors
Story points describe how long something will take in terms of relative effort. But effort takes several factors into account.
Suppose we both agree that running from point A to point B is low effort (short, flat, no obstacles), so we call it a 1.
From there, we can assess how much longer it will take to run from point A to point N. To come up with the new estimate, we consider multiple factors that go into determining effort:
 

1. Is it the same distance from A to N as from A to B? (volume)
2. Is the terrain flat and even? Or rocky? Or uphill? (complexity)
3. Does the path run along a sheer cliff or across a lava pit? Does it look unlike any other path we’ve encountered before? (risky/uncertain)

Using this information, we arrive at an estimate of relative effort.
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