Story Points

Pressure for guarantees can ruin agile plans. Learn how to build stakeholder trust with accurate estimates.

Story points are perhaps the most misunderstood topic in agile. Story points are not based on just …

Story points are about time, specifically effort. But that does not mean you should say, “One story …

Registrations are now open to Estimating with Story Points.

To create great estimates, you need to know that estimating is a human task, and humans can be complicated.

Unless team members have discussed it, they are almost certainly providing different types of estimates.

Calculating a cost per story point comes with risks. Here's what you need to know. 

Register for Estimating With Story Points before the deadline and get 4 FREE bonuses

This is the final video in a short training series about story points. Available for a limited time only.

Doors are now open (for a limited time only) to my new course: Estimating with Story Points.

In this final video on creating estimates with story points, I help you overcome one of the biggest …

Just released: Free videos to help teams solve problems when creating estimates with story points.

It seems like most projects finish late. Here’s why.

In this post I share 5 highlights from my Facebook Live session with Brian Milner.

When estimating in story points, teams should think in terms of ranges and rounding up. Here’s why.

Planning Poker relies on relative estimating, in which the item being estimated is compared to one …

Some teams like story points so much, they invent task points and use those for sprint planning. …

A rose by any other name may smell as sweet, but a five-point story better not go by any other …

It is good practice to first write large user stories (commonly known as epics) and then to split …

If story points are an estimate of the time (effort) involved in doing something, why not just …

Story points are about time. There, I’ve said it, and can’t be more clear than that. I’ve written …

All of a Scrum team’s members should be present when playing Planning Poker. You may be tempted to …

As much as I value estimating the product backlog, not every team needs to do it. And those who do …

In this session we will shatter the myth that agile teams can't plan. We'll start by looking at the …

Many of you work in a dedicated in-house team, but some of you contract with companies for Scrum …

Estimating is a way of buying knowledge. If having the additional knowledge will lead to different …

I was looking forward to reading this book. I haven't paid much attention to the PMI-ACP initiative …

It may be time to retire the phrase release planning from the Scrum or agile vocabulary.

You know that before the development team writes their first line of code, they need a funded …

You’ve probably heard some people say, “Agile teams don’t plan.” Nothing could be further from the …

Maybe you’ve heard about agile software development projects but aren’t sure if they allow for the …

Story points on an agile product backlog represent the effort to implement the backlog item.

Removing the large values from a deck of Planning Poker cards is like deciding to strike millions …

The topic of how well a team estimates two point stories relative to one point stories (and so on) …

Doing performance testing creates some amount of overhead on the team (the tax). This overhead or …

My usual recommendation is to assign points to bug fixing the agile defects. This really achieves …

When we get features that are too small (as good user stories are), it is very difficult to put a …

This agile estimation blog post from Mike Cohn looks at story points. Learn why user story points …

We've already overloaded the word backlog with product backlog and sprint backlog. Why confuse …

I'm often asked about the relationship between story points and hours. People who ask are usually …

Some teams may respond to the pressure for their abstract measure of velocity to increase by …

A common criticism of story points is that the meaning of a story point will differ among teams.

Treemaps are an excellent way of visualizing large product backlogs.

By producing a single chart that shows both a team's rate of progress and the product backlog, we …

A question I get frequently is what to do with tasks that do not belong to a particular user story …

Sprint planning meetings typically go into deeper detail than is appropriate for product backlog …

One measure we may want to include in our suite of metrics could be the responsiveness of the …

I don't use story points for sprint planning because story points are a useful long-term measure. …

When we estimate it is important that we not mix knowledge-before-the-fact with knowledge-after-the-fact.

In sprint planning the team should always talk of tasks and hours.

With no land in sight to guide them, it would have been all too easy for early sailors to get lost …

Too much work goes into use cases to not employ them to their full potential. By assigning points …