🧮 What are Story Points?
Story points are a relative measure of effort, complexity, and risk used to estimate a task or feature in Agile/Scrum.
Think of story points as a developer’s estimation of “how hard is this to do?” — not “how many hours will it take?”
✅ Story Points represent:
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🧠 Complexity – Is it logically hard?
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🕸️ Dependencies – Does it rely on something else?
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🧪 Risk/Uncertainty – Are there unknowns?
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⏱️ Effort – How much time will it likely take?
✅ Commonly used point scales:
Story Point | Meaning (roughly) |
---|---|
1 | Trivial task |
2 | Straightforward, minor logic |
3 | Moderate task with small uncertainty |
5 | More complex, needs multiple steps |
8 | Large task, might need discussion |
13+ | Too large — consider breaking down |
🧠 Why not use hours directly?
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Every developer has different speed and familiarity.
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Story points let teams track velocity over time.
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It reduces pressure to match “exact” time expectations.