Story Points explained - Part 7: Pitfalls
We've explored story points, adoption, advantages, disadvantages and techniques for estimating.
Now let's look into different pitfalls that may arise when working with them.
Comparing number of story points between teams
Enterprises need Agility. They also need to scale agility at enterprise level. Comparing different teams and understanding what high-performers do, is essential to reaching high performance at organizational level.
Comparing two different teams using story points is doomed to fail. Here are some reasons why:
They have different reference stories
They will be incentivized to change estimations in order to produce "more story points"
They have different definitions of done
They do different types of work
They are in different team stages
They have varying team member composition
If you want/need to compare between teams there are several indicators that can work such as happiness, lead time or business value fulfillment. You can also compare best practices done within each team.
Expecting story points to grow over time
The expectation that story points should grow over time is somewhat correct. The main reason it is correct is because of continuous improvement actions that teams can do so that they become more efficient.
However problems arise when people set targets to increase story points without actually removing impediments and facilitating flow.
Equating story points to time
1 SP = 1 Man Day => Problem solved
It's easy for us to estimate in Story Points now. This is an obvious anti-pattern. Connecting story points to time gets teams back into individual estimation mode.
This will stimulate the "I did my job" pattern and not encourage the "We are in this together" pattern.
There are multiple things wrong with this approach:
People can not estimate for others, so it makes it hard to discuss different problems and complexities
We start to need a lot of analysis when estimating
We will have clear separations between different functions
There is no clear understanding of what goals are
These are three of the most common anti-patterns I've seen while working with various teams and organizations. Obviously there might be more, however the advice stays the same: don't do them
This being said I hope you've enjoyed our wonderful deep dive into the world of estimating with story points.
