2. TALKING POINTS
• Velocity
• What is it and why is it important for Agile
• Where to find it in JIRA
• Story Pointing
• When to do it
• How to do it
• Where to see it in JIRA
3. VELOCITY
• How much work can a team handle in one sprint?
• Predictability builds confidence & reliability
• Different from one team to the next
• Not to be used for comparing performance
between teams
4. STORY POINTING
• Used to determine a team's velocity
• User Story gets points for complexity, effort and risk of the unknown
• Fibonacci sequence for a 2-week sprint (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.)
• Stories with lower points (1, 2, 3) = easier to complete
• Stories with higher points (5, 8, 13) = higher complexity or greater effort
• A 2-point story is estimated to require 2x the effort of a 1-point story
• A 3-point story would require 3x the effort of a 1-point story
5. STORY POINTING
• Story Points = Football Points
4th down – kick a field goal or go for the touchdown? Which is more
difficult?
Field Goal earns the team 3 points
Touchdown is worth 6 points
• DO NOT base story points on a factor of time (number of hours or days to
complete the task)
6. • Larger Stories (8, 13, etc.) -
• Attempt to identify if bigger stories can be broken
into smaller stories
• Use JIRA sub-tasks to discuss & reduce unknowns,
complexity, and effort
• Don't use sub-tasks for the obvious ("write test case,"
"test in QA," "PERF test," etc.)
• Don't point sub-tasks
7. BENCHMARKING
What are we talking about?
When beginning your pointing exercise, pick three stories which are perceived to be easy, medium
and hard. The team looks at these and agrees that the medium one is worth ‘x’ points. This then becomes
the benchmark for all the other stories.
If a team is struggling for consensus, refer to the benchmark and ask “is it easier or harder than the
benchmark?” and work it from that point.
DON’T think of story pointing based on an individual’s expertise.
Team members attend daily stand-ups and identify their progress & blockers.
Team members should seek out help from other team members on areas that they are having
difficulty.
Push teams to become self-organized and Scrum Masters and Product Owners jump in to remove
blockers.
8. PLANNING POKER
• A method for pointing stories
• Who gets to point? Everyone on the Agile development team (developer, tester,
architect)
• When is it conducted? During Sprint Grooming or Sprint Planning
• Who typically leads this? Team decides who will lead it.
9. PLANNING POKER - PROCEDURE
- Everyone is handed planning poker cards with a 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 & 13, etc.
- Someone from the team reads the user story and asks if there are any questions
- When the team is ready to vote, everyone raises their card at the same time
- The team assesses if everyone has a consensus on points
- If there are discrepancies (ex. 3 people have a '5' raised but 2 people have raised the
number '8'), then the team discusses why there is a discrepancy, and conducts a re-vote to
get a consensus.
- Stories with high points consensus? Identify the sub-tasks so that the story has clear
agreement
10. SPRINT RETRO TIP:
Carve out 20 minutes or so during your Retro session to evaluate each of the stories. Go on-by-one with
each JIRA story and leave some notes that answer some questions:
- How accurate was the point estimate?
- Should it have been higher or lower?
- Why?
This will help the team get better at story pointing for the next sprints. It should also help the team
prepare their “Definition of Ready” and/or “Definition of Done” for the user stories.
Definition of Ready – defines criteria for whether a story is ready to be accepted in the sprint
Definition of Done – defines criteria for whether a story is completed at the end of the sprint
11. SUMMARY
• Velocity = how many points can a
team complete in a given sprint?
• Committed vs. Completed
• Expect to have fewer points
completed in early sprints
• Avoid carrying stories from one
sprint to another
• Do Not use time as a measure for
story points
• One team's velocity can be
different from another's
