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August 18, 2014

Why do we use Story Points for

Estimating?
 Derek Davidson

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 22 Comments (https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-do-we-
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28/06/2020 Why do we use Story Points for Estimating? | Scrum.org

Story Points - An Introduction

(/)
The scrum guide tells us that estimates should be provided by people that will
be doing the work but it doesn’t tell us how we should provide estimates. It
leaves that decision to us. A common tactic used by scrum teams is to estimate
using a unit of measurement referred to as the Story Point. But why use Story
Points instead of hours or days or any other well-known unit of time? Are we
deliberately trying to obfuscate? In this article I look at the pros and cons of
using Story Points and come to a surprising conclusion.

What is a Story Point?

(https://s3.amazonaws.com/scrumorg-blog/wp-

content/uploads/2014/08/22191825/Unsure.png)
Unsure about Story Points?

I did a quick search on Google for the phrase “What are Story Points”. I was
hoping to get a clear de nition of the term but it proved highly elusive. The list I
got back from Google wasn’t overly helpful and some of the higher placed links
were, in my view, simply wrong in places. Surprisingly (to me at least) an article
I had written, a necessarily terse precis on estimating in Scrum
(http://www.webgate.ltd.uk/estimating-in-scrum-just-the-facts/) appeared on
the rst page of the search and I hadn’t tried to de ne what a Story Point was at
all.

Summary: I couldn’t nd a clear de nition of what a Story Point is on the

Internet. So, here’s my attempt:

“A Story Point is a relative unit of measure, decided upon and used by individual
Scrum teams, to provide relative estimates of e ort for completing requirements“

 Why use Story Points?

https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-do-we-use-story-points-estimating?gclid=CjwKCAjw_-D3BRBIEiwAjVMy7PpIl-_CTdrWpDTLmGZQSCZZzblAlj… 2/6
28/06/2020 Why do we use Story Points for Estimating? | Scrum.org

Story Points are intended to make team estimating easier. Instead of looking at
a product backlog item and estimating it in hours, teams consider only how
much e ort a product backlog
(/) item will require, relative to other product
backlog items.

Ok, so it makes estimating easier but how is that useful? Story Points are of no
value whatever to a business because they can’t be used to predict cost or
delivery dates. Even the Scrum team cannot make any predictions as to how
many Story Points it can complete in a sprint (velocity) until it’s got a few sprints
under it’s belt, some months down the road.

Story Points are confusing

(https://s3.amazonaws.com/scrumorg-
blog/wp-
content/uploads/2014/08/22191825/Con
Confused about Story Points?

Story Points themselves are confusing.

Mike Cohn, respected author of the book “Agile Estimating and Planning”
recently wrote an article explaining why you should use e ort and not
complexity in deciding relative sizes of product backlog items
(http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/its-e ort-not-complexity).  It’s a
good article but the comments from readers leaves you in no doubt that here’s
a lot of confusion around the topic of Story Points.

What’s wrong with using time as a unit

of measure?

https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-do-we-use-story-points-estimating?gclid=CjwKCAjw_-D3BRBIEiwAjVMy7PpIl-_CTdrWpDTLmGZQSCZZzblAlj… 3/6
28/06/2020 Why do we use Story Points for Estimating? | Scrum.org

For hundreds of years we’ve had standard units of time. Why can’t we use
hours or days? Well, in a nutshell, because your hour is not the same as my
hour. (/)

If you ask two developers to estimate the same task, you’ll get two di erent
answers. While some of the di erence might be explained by gaps in the
speci cation or understanding, the fact is that developers have di erent
knowledge and experiences so it will take more or less time to do the same
work.

Ask those same two developers to rate the amount of e ort required to
complete one product backlog item relative to another product backlog item
and you’re far more likely to end up with a consensus.

The real reason for using Story Points

So, up until now, you may have been unconvinced about the need to use Story
Points. Ok, they show the relative e ort to complete work on di erent product
backlog items but how does that help anything? Until we understand what the
team’s velocity is, we still can’t predict when product backlog items are likely to
be completed. Worse, if the membership of the team changes, the velocity will
change and we won’t know what that new velocity is until some time down the
road.

All these problems have led many to try and make a correlation between Story
Points and time but as Mike Cohn points out in his article on relating story
points to hours (http://www.mountaingoatsoftware.com/blog/how-do-story-
points-relate-to-hours), it’s not trivial.

But to try and match Story Points to hours is missing the point. What’s
important is how many Story Points a team can complete in a sprint, known as
the velocity. When you know this, you can make some predictions and you
know what, they’re likely to be good. Very good.

https://www.scrum.org/resources/blog/why-do-we-use-story-points-estimating?gclid=CjwKCAjw_-D3BRBIEiwAjVMy7PpIl-_CTdrWpDTLmGZQSCZZzblAlj… 4/6
28/06/2020 Why do we use Story Points for Estimating? | Scrum.org

(https://s3.amazonaws.com/scrumorg-blog/wp-
(/)

content/uploads/2014/08/22191824/Delighted.png)
Delighted about Story Points!

The real reason for using Story Points is that they’re accurate.

Who says so? Je Sutherland, the co-author of the Scrum Guide. In his article
on why Story Points are better than hours
(http://scrum.je sutherland.com/2010/04/story-points-why-are-they-better-
than.html) he puts it like this:  Story points are therefore faster, better, and
cheaper than hours and the highest performing teams completely abandon any
hourly estimation as they view it as waste that just slows them down.

It’s nice to get clarity on these things.

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JP • a year ago
I'm still looking for an article which mention the calibration issue. The first estimated
story, how do you decide if t's 1, 20 or 100 story points? I understand relativity but what
about the first estimation?
4△ ▽ • Reply • Share ›

Michael > JP • 9 months ago

For the first estimate, the team should choose a couple of stories of different
sizes, and assign Story Points to them. These are known as the base line
estimates, and should be used for future stories to estimate relative to these. I
h f d it f l i th tt th b li t i h d

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