As a Scrum Master, one of my duties is to always make sure that my team is building the right thing and ensuring a specific tasks with detailed requirements are assigned to them and through out my experience as a Scrum Master, sometimes there will be a discrepancy between client’s expectations and my team’s delivery. In order to align the expectations between two parties, it is important to set the timeline the right way ! and based on scrum, I have been using story points to measure my team’s efforts in delivering a task.
What is Story Points ?
Story points are a unit of measure used in Agile project management, specifically in Scrum, to estimate the relative effort or complexity of user stories or backlog items. They provide a way to assess the work involved in implementing a particular feature or functionality.
Instead of estimating in terms of time (e.g., hours or days), which can be subjective and vary based on individual team members’ skill levels, story points focus on the overall effort or complexity involved. Story points represent a combination of factors, including the effort required, technical complexity, risks, and dependencies.
Example of Story Points estimation using T-shirt Sizing
Since story points are based on estimating the complexity of a task in general. I have been using a t-shirt sizing reference to estimate the task. Below is the example I found on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tlKMpFQCj8) :
As you can see here, the idea is pretty straightforward any small tasks that take minimum efforts will be equivalent to XS and major tasks with big impact will be equivalent to XXL.
Assign Story Points on JIRA
To assign story points on JIRA, you can task details like below:
Are story points still relevant for Scrum team ?
Based on my current experience, to me story points are still relevant in Scrum teams. They help estimate the relative effort or complexity of user stories, promote collaboration, track velocity, allow for adaptive planning, and assist with performance analysis and forecasting especially on meeting client’s expactions on the delivery timeline. But, I’m still learning and unlearning about Scrum, and each Scrum team works differently.
Thank you for reading.
