Let's imagine that we have a bunch of things which we want to do. Let's call these things stories. Now imagine that we don't know exactly how to do all that things but we would like to know when we finish all of them and how much work left. We would like to correct our estimations, know more as we will go forward with finishing every next story. What we can do? We take out as much as we can from the only information which we have - the bunch of stories and our experience (if we have one).
Some of the stories are complex, some are simple but seem to require a lot of work. So which word would cover complexity and time at once? The word is effort! OK, so currently we know that we want to estimate the effort required to do the stories. But which unit we are going to use? How we will measure that, in hours, in meters? Actually it is just our guess, so this is an abstract unit. We can call it however we want, but because it is relate to stories let's call this unit just a story point.
OK, so we have kind of an abstract unit and a bunch of stories. So what we can do now is for example choose one small and one big story, and assign to them appropriately small and big amount of story points. Now we can compare other stories to them. Thanks to that we will know relative effort of the stories. When we start to do the stories we will learn how much time one story point takes us and based on that better estimate when we are going to finish all bunch.
This is just the general idea behind the story points. In the next post I'll give you more details.
Some of the stories are complex, some are simple but seem to require a lot of work. So which word would cover complexity and time at once? The word is effort! OK, so currently we know that we want to estimate the effort required to do the stories. But which unit we are going to use? How we will measure that, in hours, in meters? Actually it is just our guess, so this is an abstract unit. We can call it however we want, but because it is relate to stories let's call this unit just a story point.
OK, so we have kind of an abstract unit and a bunch of stories. So what we can do now is for example choose one small and one big story, and assign to them appropriately small and big amount of story points. Now we can compare other stories to them. Thanks to that we will know relative effort of the stories. When we start to do the stories we will learn how much time one story point takes us and based on that better estimate when we are going to finish all bunch.
This is just the general idea behind the story points. In the next post I'll give you more details.
