Improve your estimations and release planning.
Story points are estimating the implementation complexity of a story, rather than the required time. Estimating in Story Points will improve the accuracy of your release plans, decrease the estimation effort for your teams and the variation in estimates due to external changes.
A widespread technique to estimate in Story Points is the Planning Poker. It is a format based on a shared understanding of a story. We at basysKom estimate with Story Points in the size of 1,2,3,5,8,13,20,40,100. Where 1 is a story with a clear idea and low implementation complexity and a 100 is a story which is super complex and not yet implementable. Stories that are taken into a sprint backlog usually end up in the range of 1 to 8 Story Points.
In a Planning Poker-session the Product Owner presents a story to the team; the team can now talk about the story. After that, everyone estimates for themselves. Once everyone has an estimation selected, each team member presents their estimation to the others. This is the point where the lowest estimator and the highest estimator need to explain why they decided upon their number. This way, you can discover hidden complexity, find unspoken questions, and increase the team understanding.
SCRUM
SCRUM
Roughly 1-2 team hours a week
Agile projects
One of the biggest mistakes is to assume that Story Points can be directly converted into time. This is not directly the case. Story Points are about the relative complexity of stories compared to each other. At some point you will get a Story Point velocity (the team achives an average of X Story Points every sprint). The velocity is the value you can take to setup an estimation when a certain story can be done.