By Brant Wilkerson-New
January 3, 2025
What’s the best way to estimate a project’s time management? The answer is story points.
Estimating work has always been a challenge in software development and project management. Traditional time-based agile estimation methods often need twice as much time and cause product owners to miss deadlines, development team burnout, and project delays.
Enter story points—a revolutionary approach that has transformed how an agile team estimates and plans its work. Estimating story points is a technique born from the need for more accurate and flexible project planning and management. It has become an indispensable tool in modern agile story methodologies.
Story Points vs Traditional Methods
Story points represent a fundamental shift in how we view work estimation. Unlike conventional hours or days-based estimates, a story point estimates the inherent complexity and uncertainty in a company’s project work. Instead of hours of aimless planning, story points can help measure the level of required effort and combine multiple factors into a single, relative unit of measurement.
When many teams and project development stages intertwine, story points help you achieve your goal. When work complexity creates challenges and when traditional time estimates often fail to capture the true scope of long tasks, story points make life simpler.
The beauty of story points for agile teams lies in their adaptability and team-centric nature. They acknowledge that different teams work at different paces and that estimation is more art than science. By moving away from rigid time-based predictions, story points create a more collaborative and realistic framework for agile project management. They let owners and team members fully implement their collective experience and knowledge for optimal project outcomes.
Organizations are increasingly adopting agile methodologies, including many story points. Project managers, product owners, business developers, technical writers, and stakeholders plan, track, and deliver work effectively, thanks to story points.
How do they work, though? Here’s a look at story points and their philosophy.
The Nature of Story Points
Story points are comprised of three-story point dimensions that work together to create a picture of a task’s scope.
Complexity
How complicated is the task? Complexity is the first dimension and refers to how technically complicated a feature or a task is.
Effort
The second dimension is effort: how much effort do you have to take to complete the story?
Risk or Uncertainty
The third dimension is risk and uncertainty, which accounts for any potential risks or unknown factors that might affect the implementation of a product or process.
These three aspects combine to form a single, relative unit of measure that teams can use to estimate the amount of work needed to produce effective results.
The Value of Story Point Estimation
Time-based estimates often create unnecessary pressure and lead to inaccurate planning. When deadlines are missed, a whole project falls behind.
The thinking behind story points is that they focus on relative size rather than a specific amount of time commitments. That way, teams can reduce the psychological sprints associated with estimation.
This approach naturally accommodates the uncertainty that always exists in software development and helps create a shared understanding of effort across different types of work. Likewise, story points provide a consistent metric for tracking scrum team performance through velocity measurements. This helps with long-term planning and prediction.
Estimation Process and Implementation
To assign story points, start by selecting a baseline story that will serve as a reference point for all other estimating and planning.
This baseline should be a simple, well-understood story that the team can easily relate to and compare against. Scrum teams then evaluate new stories relative to this baseline, taking into account all the relevant factors: complexity, effort, and uncertainty. Through collaborative discussion, teams reach a consensus on estimates that reflect their collective understanding of the work involved.
The following example should clarify how this works in practice.
Setting the Baseline: A Practical Example
Consider a technical documentation team working on an individual software product’s documentation. Their chosen baseline story is, “Write a how-to guide for resetting a user password.” This story earns 2 story points and serves as their team’s baseline for several reasons.
First, it’s a task that every team member understands completely. Story points in agile teams involve documenting a simple feature with clear steps, screenshots, and user interface elements.
The scope, too, is well-defined: the guide needs to cover both self-service password reset and administrator-assisted reset options.
Finally, the team knows that creating this documentation will require interviewing one developer, taking screenshots of the interface, writing the step-by-step instructions, and having another team member review the content.
This level of complexity is moderate but manageable. While the task involves multiple steps and some technical details, it doesn’t require deep technical research or complex system understanding. It contains just enough moving parts to make it a useful reference point — it’s neither too trivial nor too complex.
Moving from the base story
When using this baseline for comparison, the team can now evaluate other stories more effectively. For instance, if they need to estimate writing documentation for user authentication via social media, they might ask, “Compared to our password reset guide (2 points), how complex is this task?” They might determine it’s about twice as complex because it involves multiple authentication providers and more technical concepts, thus assigning it 5 points.
This baseline story becomes particularly valuable when estimating edge cases. For example, updating a simple error message in the documentation might be deemed a 1-point story because it’s clearly simpler than the password reset guide. Conversely, creating comprehensive API documentation might be an 8-point story because it requires a greater amount of effort and it’s significantly more complex than the baseline, requiring deeper technical knowledge and more extensive testing.
Measuring Success and Progress
Success in story point estimations can be measured through several key metrics that provide insight into team performance and project progress:
- Team velocity is calculated as the average number of points completed per sprint and serves as a fundamental metric for planning and capacity assessment.
- Teams also track relative estimation as they compare initial estimates against the actual effort required. This helps them refine their estimation process over time.
- Sprint burndown charts take into account visibility into progress within iterations. They help teams identify and overcome any potential obstacles to meeting their sprint goals.
Common Challenges and Solutions
Like any other management tool, agile story points often face challenges.
- One common issue is the temptation to convert points directly to time, which undermines the relative nature of story points.
- Points are relative. Thus, another challenge is the tendency to compare points between different teams, which can lead to misleading conclusions since each team’s point scale is valid only with their own context.
- Teams must also maintain a strict focus on the relative nature of points and calibrate their estimates. They must resist external pressure to use points for performance evaluation.
Story Points in Technical Documentation
Story points are especially practical in technical documentation projects, where they help teams learn and manage complex items effectively.
Technical writing teams can use story points to estimate various documentation activities, from creating new content to updating existing documentation.
For instance, if a technical writing team is creating a comprehensive API reference guide, this task might be assigned a higher point value because of its complexity and the research required to complete. Updating the existing documentation might receive a lower point value, which reflects its relative simplicity.
Story Points for Technical Writing and Beyond
If you want to give your team a clearer way to estimate projects, story points can be an invaluable tool. Whether you’re managing a great number of technical writing or agile software development workflow, story points become the safety valve for the amount of work each piece of work will take.
Using story points is an effective and flexible approach to estimation in agile software development and technical writing. When implemented in the way they were meant to be, story points help teams better understand their capacity, improve sprint planning accuracy, and maintain a sustainable product management pace.
The key to successful story point implementation lies in keeping their relative nature and building on team collaboration in estimation. Only then can story points help an organization plan and track purposes.
Teams can practice and experience with story points. Once they get the hang of it, they will witness how their estimation approach leads to more realistic project planning and better team alignment around work efforts.
If you feel your organization could benefit from story points, contact us today to share your project’s goals and find out how we can help. TimelyText is a trusted professional writing service and instructional design consulting partner for Fortune 500 companies worldwide.
- About the Author
- Latest Posts
I’m a storyteller!
Exactly how I’ve told stories has changed through the years, going from writing college basketball analysis in the pages of a newspaper to now, telling the stories of the people of TimelyText. Nowadays, that means helping a talented technical writer land a new gig by laying out their skills, or even a quick blog post about a neat project one of our instructional designers is finishing in pharma.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.