Are User Stories & Story Points Required? No... - Mike Cohn

Are User Stories & Story Points Required? No... - Mike Cohn

I’m often asked if user stories are part of Scrum.
No, they’re not. You can have a phenomenally successful team and never work with user stories at all.
At its core Scrum is a very small set of rules. The Scrum rules are defined in the Scrum Guide, and they’re things like keeping sprints short, no longer than a month.
Outside this core of rules are the generally accepted Scrum practices. These are good ideas every Scrum Master should be aware of, but that a team doesn’t necessarily need to do. User stories fit here.
A great Scrum Master should know what user stories are. They may think stories are awful and not recommend using them for a team, but they should at least know what they are.
What about Story Points?
Story points are another generally accepted Scrum practice that isn’t officially part of Scrum.
Story points are a useful way for team members to agree on an estimate. Points get around a common problem: A senior team member thinks something will take one day, a junior team member thinks two days, and they’re both right depending on who does the task.
I think story points are great because they help you avoid pointless debates, they save time, and they increase the chances that your estimates will be accurate. They are my recommended unit for estimating product backlog items.
But not every team needs to estimate! And you certainly don’t have to use story points if you do estimate–you can use person days or some other unit if you prefer.
I do, however, think that you should give story points and user stories a try. For the majority of teams, they are both great practices that will help you succeed with agile,

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