Agile estimation is the process of approximating the effort required to deliver a product or feature When teams estimate work items at the product backlog level, estimates are relative. These relative estimates are expressed with an abstract measure like story points or ideal days.

Planning Poker® is a consensus-based estimating technique. Agile teams around the world use Planning Poker to estimate their product backlogs. Planning Poker can be used with story points, ideal days, or any other estimating unit.

…on how to use story points to create great estimates. If you’ve enjoyed the free videos, why not sign up for the full Estimating with Story Points course? It will be available to new members for one week, until November 24 at 9 p.m. Pacific, and then we’ll close the…

…huge fan of using story points for estimating the product backlog. However, I also recommend estimating the sprint backlog in hours rather than in points. Why this seeming contradiction? I've previously blogged on the reasons why I recommend using different estimation units (points and hours) for the different backlogs. But…

…about the relationship between story points and hours. People who ask are usually looking for me to say something like “one story point = 8.3 hours.” Well, that just isn't the case (especially since I made up 8.3 hours). Let's see what the real relationship is between the agile point…

…is another type of story: the complex story. Complex stories are ones that cannot be split. They are inherently large or complex and there are no subparts to be pulled into separate stories. Even with a complex story, you don’t want to let the story linger open for three, four…

…cost risk. Teams Think Story Points Are Just Complexity I mention this because I find too many teams who think that story points should be based on the complexity of the user story or feature rather than the effort to develop it. Such teams often re-label “story points” as “complexity…

…teams write a user story for this activity such as: “As a user, I want at least 15 bugs fixed” or, “As a user, I want you to spend about 50 hours this sprint fixing bugs so that the application becomes gradually more high quality.” Even a team that doesn't…

If story points are an estimate of the time (effort) involved in doing something, why not just estimate directly in hours or days? Why use points at all? There are multiple good reasons to estimate product backlog items in story points, and I cover them fully in the Agile Estimating…

Using story points or ideal days to measure productivity is a bad idea because it will lead the team to gradually inflate the meaning of a point—when trying to decide between calling something “two points” or “three points” it is clear they will round up if they are being evaluated…

…a common baseline for story points across relatively large teams (a few hundred developers). In this post I want to consider whether doing so is a good idea. The need for a common baseline to story points usually arises from the reasonable desire to know how big the entire project…

…let me put some points on each car. I'll start with the least desirable car and put a 1 on it, a 2 on the next car, etc. That reorders our list so with points on each car we get: Tata Nano Toyota Camry Toyota Prius Aston Martin Vanquish Porsche…

Estimating With Story Points is currently closed for new registrations. You can register here to find out when doors open again. This past week I’ve shared free online video training to help tackle some of the most common problems teams face when estimating with story points. If you’ve enjoyed the…