Trade in T-Shirts for Ski Slopes: A Better Way to Explain Story Points!
Most scrum masters have probably heard a dev say in frustration, “What does a t-shirt size have to do with how long it takes me to write this code!?” Story points can be a complicated concept to understand, despite the arsenal of articles and relative techniques that try to make this concept easier to grasp. It can start to feel like you’re running around in circles (or circling that Fibonacci curve!) trying to explain how to actually use story points when it’s game time. To this I say, let us consider ski run categories (or “pistes” if you want to get fancy)!
Ski slopes in the US are generally categorized, in the order of easy to advanced, as green circles, blue squares, black diamonds, and double black diamonds. There are guidelines that dictate what slope grades merit which category, but most skiers probably couldn’t even begin to guess what that break down looks like. What they will know is that the greens will be exponentially easier than the diamonds, and the blues will be somewhere in between.
The most novice and most advanced skier can look at a run categorized as green and agree: It’s a mild slope, the expectation is that it’s going to be pretty smooth, and this guy won’t take you by surprise. A professional skier might blow through this slope in 2 minutes where a beginner might take 20 minutes, but that doesn’t change the fact for either of them that it’s still a green slope.
At the same time, they can both look at a diamond and know that slope grade is going to be tough and there is probably a much higher likelihood of getting surprised by a ski yeti. A pro skier might tackle this with dexterity and grace in 10 minutes, and a novice skier might end up sliding down the whole thing on her butt to find solace in a cup of hot chocolate at the bottom 30 minutes later. But again, despite how long it takes each to get down, there is no question that this is a diamond.
And the great thing about this is that its relative from mountain to mountain (or to bring it back to Scrum, relative from team to team), and there can be variation within a category. You can have three completely different runs that may be longer or shorter or maybe one is technically a bunny hill, but they are still greens.
Which brings us back to story points! Unlike the t-shirt metaphor, this more robust scheme better accounts for how time, complexity and unknowns factor into story points.
“But my team works in the middle of a desert and has never seen snow!” you say.
That’s ok! There are plenty of other metaphors that can work if the skiing example is not your team’s cup of tea. The key is to ground story points in a dynamic environment that uses a universal skill set your team is already familiar with — maybe that means using Call of Duty’s “Recruit”, “Regular”, “Hardened”, and “Veteran” game difficulty categories as a way to capture the essence of story points. The possibilities are endless and will hopefully help your team master story points in a more familiar and enjoyable way. Get creative and share any other ideas you come up with by leaving us a comment!
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