A story point is a unit of measure used by Scrum teams to estimate the effort required to complete a user story. Story points are relative, rather than absolute, measures of effort. This means that the effort required to complete one story point’s worth of work may vary from team to team or even from sprint to sprint within the same team. Story points are used to help teams plan and track their progress during a sprint.
Here are some examples of how story points might be used in Scrum:
- A team might assign a user story a value of 3 story points if they estimate that it will take about 3 times as much effort to complete as a user story that they have assigned a value of 1 story point.
- During sprint planning, the team might use their average velocity (the number of story points they typically complete in a sprint) to determine how many user stories they can commit to completing in the upcoming sprint.
- During the sprint review, the team might compare the number of story points they completed during the sprint to their average velocity to assess their performance and identify areas for improvement.
It is important to note that story points are not equivalent to time. A user story with a higher story point value does not necessarily take longer to complete than one with a lower value. Instead, story points reflect the relative effort required to complete a user story, taking into account factors such as complexity, uncertainty, and risk.