🧮 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:

  • 🧠 Complexity – Is it logically hard?

  • 🕸️ Dependencies – Does it rely on something else?

  • 🧪 Risk/Uncertainty – Are there unknowns?

  • ⏱️ Effort – How much time will it likely take?


✅ Commonly used point scales:

Story PointMeaning (roughly)
1Trivial task
2Straightforward, minor logic
3Moderate task with small uncertainty
5More complex, needs multiple steps
8Large task, might need discussion
13+Too large — consider breaking down

🧠 Why not use hours directly?

  • Every developer has different speed and familiarity.

  • Story points let teams track velocity over time.

  • It reduces pressure to match “exact” time expectations.