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The Real Benefits of Estimating in Story Points

Practical ways to improve your risk management practices and team’s collective knowledge by estimating User Stories in Story Points.

Story Points have become a standard metric for software development teams for expressing estimates of the overall effort required to deliver features during the Sprint.

Unfortunately very often teams and business stakeholders put too much faith into the abstract number instead of directing their focus on the process of estimating.

Story Points are abstract numbers that were not invented to create quarterly based release plans, making a long-term commitments or building project plans based on team’s velocity — but to let teams be more efficient during their work in Sprints by helping them to early identify risks, improve collective knowledge of a team and build common understanding of business problems.

Use Story Points:

• To identify gaps in understanding what needs to happen to implement particular feature. It could help spread the technical knowledge in the team and improve the collective knowledge;
• To assess the level of risk during the Sprint, the greater the estimation the higher risk of unknowns unknows —…