What are Story Points and How to Play Scrum Poker?

Merve Akgul

Published in

Mobillium

6 min readDec 19, 2022

What are Story Points?

That tells the Scrum Team the difficulty level of the item.
The difficulty may be related to the complexities, risks and effort involved. Estimates made are relative estimates.
Because the story point is a high-level estimate of user stories, it’s usually best done before Sprint Planning.
Members of the team make predictions using their Fibonacci Numbers or T-Shirt Size.
The Story Point, which they decide jointly, creates the score of the story. Story Points are used to calculate Velocity (the speed of the Scrum Team).
The Story Points completed by the team within the Sprint and accepted as “DONE” by the Product Owner. In other words; It is the ability of the team to produce a working software (Increment).

Fibonacci Numbers: The most preferred magnitude values are inspired by this number sequence.

0–1–2–3–5–8–13–21–40–100

T-Shirt Size: An alternative method for those who do not want to make a guess in terms of numbers is T-Shirt Size.

XXS — XS — S — M — L — XL — XXL

To do this, you assign each project or task a t-shirt size (from Extra Small to XXL) to represent that task’s relative effort. Depending on how you choose to use this tool, a T-Shirt size can represent task scope, effort, complexity, work hours, time estimates or all of the above.

You can play online or poker cards when giving Story Points.

How to Play Scrum Poker?

If you haven’t used story points before, we recommend you to use your knowledge of the tasks of your team.

Explain to your team that the necessity of story point numbers need to scale relative to each other and why it is important.
Choose the method Fibonacci or T-Shirt size for estimation.
You have to tell the team how to give the estimates.

You should teach your team how to story point them on the tasks they typically complete and the complexity, uncertainty, and effort associated with them.

**Tip:** The following example is given for your understanding of the structure, it is empirical. Before you make an effort, you must establish a common understanding with your team. Your story point will evolve as you run sprints and gain a better understanding of the effort associated with your team’s tasks.

4. Estimating your story points with scheduling a scrum poker meeting.

Prepare the environment for the team to story point (online or real card)
Select a user story.
Discuss the story with your team, like what’s involved and what success looks like.
Have each team member privately select the story point card they feel represents the amount of effort required to complete the story.
Have your team reveal their card selections at the same time. If the story points align, move on to the next user story. If the story points don’t align, continue to discuss the user story until you reach an agreement.
Repeat the process until you’ve assigned story points to all the tasks in your product backlog.
For the first sprint, you can give the team-accepted story point, then this understanding will be adopted and developed by the team.

5. If it’s your first time using story points, you won’t know exactly how many story points you can complete per sprint (also known as sprint velocity) until you’ve completed your first full sprint. In your sprint planning meeting, use your best estimation of how many story points to include in your sprint based on the complexity of tasks and the story point value.

Remember that story points are not always clear and not hour estimates.

Estimate with story point in:

Pros

The whole team is responsible for the estimation, which means the estimation will be more trustworthy
You realize the difficulty of all the tasks and can assume more or less when they will be delivered
Lack of stress connected with “time ticking” in the team
The task will be done without “suggestion” to how long it should take
The task has an estimation independent of the developer who will implement it
One for all, all for all approach

Cons

It requires two or three sprints to learn how to use story points to estimate and predict the capacity of the development team
Not the most “transparent” way of task estimation

Scrum Poker Online

It’s free.
Create your room, you can share QR&RoomNumber&url with your team. You can use fibonacci numbers.
Discussing items for the scrum team and giving story points to each team member.
Discuss with the team how many points you will give based on the results.
Participants can give the score either privately or publicly.

2. Scrumpoker Online

It’s free.
You can choose Fibonacci number, T-shirt size and custom decks.

Create your room, you can share QR&RoomNumber with your team.

You can integrations for GitHub and JIRA, with more plugins under development. If you would like to use either one of those, select it from the tab control at the top and enter the necessary information to fetch issues from the server.

3. Scrumpy

You can choose Fibonacci number, T-shirt size and custom decks.
You can use online or integrations with Jira, Slack, GitHub, GitLab and you can estimate for issues.
You can integrate for Jira, free for 10 users but costs per user for 10+ users.

Online version is free.
You can even install as a progressive Web application on your mobile phone for convenience.

You can use special cards.

4. Agile Scrum Planning Poker for Jira

You can choose Fibonacci number, T-shirt size and custom decks.
You can integrate for Jira, free for 10 users but costs per user for 10+ users.
You can real-time chat and update.
You can choose issues and participant, create a new game.

5. Estimate-Dev Labs for Azure DevOps

It’s free.
Select any number of items on your backlog and start a new session from the context menu.
Each estimation is saved to your work items as soon as you have estimated.