Story Points

A much healthier unit of complexity than "IdealDays" or "GummiBearsOfComplexity" to estimate UserStories and generate a ProjectVelocity.

RobertCecilMartin often tells this story to executives. It gets them drooling...

"You walk into the project war room any time you like. On the wall is a chart showing the project velocity for the last three months. This charts tells you how many story-points have been added to the system every TwoWeeks. Next to it is a list of the stories for the current release, with a total of the story-points on the bottom. You can divide that total by the average velocity and get a very good idea of when the release will be done."

TODO: Someone please stitch this into the UserStory, PlanningGame, and ProjectVelocity pages, huh?

Perhaps somewhat pessimistic view, but I suspect soon the users will start "negotiating" how many story-point each story really "worth", thinking that by reducing the story-point of the stories will somehow make the project finish earlier.

They don't need to negotiate the worth of the story. The estimate is just a price tag. In America, where XP originated, you don't negotiate the price of each item in your GroceryCart?. If it's too expensive, you buy something cheaper or you just don't buy any coffee at all this week.

The valuable discussion to have around estimates is "Why is this so expensive?" These discussions often uncover unspoken assumptions that lead to a simpler (to implement) story that still solves the business problem.

My colleagues and I have been using StoryPoints for years now. We even came to call them NUTs - NebulousUnitOfTime. KentBeck wrote about using real time in the 2nd edition of his XP book. I was encouraged by a client of ours to give real time a try, instead of using StoryPoints. So Industrial Logic went about UsingHoursInsteadOfStoryPoints on a real project. --JoshuaKerievsky