Best Way to Estimate Effort Using Story Points in Sprint Planning

Take a scientific approach to analyse and compare methods of estimating effort using story points.

Sarah Fan
Serious Scrum

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Image source: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/top-3-agile-estimation-techniquesapproaches-dmytro-kaleniuk/

Agile has been widely used in software development and project delivery. Although they are the most popular way to estimate effort in Sprint Planning and estimation, story points can be misused and mismeasured due to lacking a thorough definition. Management may use them to measure a team's productivity or effectiveness, leading to a delivery team inflating story points, gaming the system, and other anti-agile behaviours. This reflects the misunderstanding of the meaning and purpose of story points.

Agile and Common Agile Methods

There are extensive materials and discussions available online on this topic. In summary, agile is a project management philosophy that guides orientation on managing projects through key values and principles iteratively.

Extreme Programming (XP) and Scrum are commonly used for agile methods. XP has evolved from the problems caused by the long development cycles of traditional development models and has “theorised” on the key principles and practices after a number of successful trials in practice (e.g. constant integration and automated testing…

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Sarah Fan
Serious Scrum

A data and digital transformation expert passionate about new tech and Gen AI, simplifying complex concepts and inspiring innovation through engaging writing.