Story Points — Love Them or Leave Them?

Some find estimating using story points helpful while others find that story points lead to abuse, gaming, and unnecessary debates.

I was teaching an introductory agile training course last week and noticed that many of the students got confused about story points. Taking a step back, I can appreciate their confusion about how story points work.

I personally like story points and find them helpful, especially for new teams. A lot of people don’t like them. Let’s explore why that might be.

People Get Confused About Story Points

People in my class got confused about story points.

They did not seem to be confused about relative estimating. They were able to use planning poker as a team. They were also able to grasp the concept of T-shirt sizing and used affinity estimating as a team. We used the great dog grooming exercise from David A Koontz of the Agile Complexification Inverter site. Participants were able to quickly sort the dogs into groups that were roughly the same size and would “cost” about the same for grooming.

They were not confused about the concept of estimating how big things were relative to one another.