Agile Team Planning: Story Points vs. Lead Time — Which is Best?

Different Angle, Different View

There is always another approach to breaking down issues that you cannot resolve now.

As an agile evangelist, I am often seeking for latest tools to not only help a team improve their performance but also assist me boost life efficiency. Last year I was impressed by a historical data from one of my podcast episodes《Teach You to Precisely Predict Timeline：Using Story Points》, which triggered a burst in the number of downloads (> 2000).

I came to realize that most people suffer from reporting to their managers, especially when it comes to estimating an accurate schedule. In fact, many agile teams face the same problems: what is a better way of forecasting possible falling-point of projects. When I first learned how to evaluate how much effort I should take on a product backlog, the idea of story point was incorporated into our projects. But it might seem counter-intuitive and needs some time to get used to.

In Jan. 2023, my colleague and I applied for a Kanban course overturning my…