What are User Stories? 

A user story is a form of software system requirement that has become quite popular in Agile Methodologies such as Scrum. Unlike more traditional methods the emphasis in these methodologies is simplicity and changeability. Therefore, user stories are designed to be easily described and understood, and more importantly easily changed by the end customer during the project.

The attributes of a good user story are:

  • Written using language that can be easily understood by the customer and end-user
  • Short enough that it consists of a few sentences and can fit onto a small card (read or electronic)
  • Focused enough that they describe small increments of functionality that can be completed in several days or weeks
  • Frequently changed based on discussions with the customer as the functionality becomes better understood

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What is Story Points in Agile? 

Story points in Agile are used to determine how much effort will be needed for a user story.

Interestingly, up to this day story points have not been integrated into Jira as thoroughly as one might expect. For example, most projects start with epics that a model Agilist would estimate in story points. Epics are to be divided into stories at a later stage of a project’s lifespan, but surprisingly no automatic decomposition of story points will occur, therefore most of the stories will not have story points which leads to miscalculation on assignment of stories.

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Kaiburr

Benefits of Story Points: 

  • Provide a common, relative measure of effort.
  • Save time when making precise estimates.

Not everyone likes estimating, and it takes time and effort to do. Given the costs and challenges of doing it right, why bother at all?

Benefits for development teams: 

  • They know how much to plan in a sprint so they can work at a sustainable pace.
  • They’re more likely to create a done increment by not over-planning the sprint.
  • Increases the understanding of requirements and implementation strategy through discussion and elaboration

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Kaiburr

Benefits for product owners: 

  • They’re to forecast longer-term delivery of their product.
  • They can assess the “value for money” or “return on investment” of items
  • They get visibility of technical risks associated with large items

“However not all Story points are tagged to User Stories, in other words, not all User stories have story points which leads to improper calculation of efforts, deliverables and project completion.”

Kaiburr, with its intelligence scans through all the stories, identifies the user stories which does not have story points in the form of reports and charts.

Kaiburr

Kaiburr

In the above figure, Stories having story points are marked in Green and stories without story points are marked in Red 

Story points are always in Fibonacci series

To assign a value to the stories, the user can use the Fibonacci sequence. The Fibonacci sequence story point estimates of 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 and so on. This is the more effective method to measure the stories.

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Kaiburr

 

Fibonacci series is a new number in the pattern can be generated by simply adding the previous two numbers. Starting from 0 and 1.
0,1,1,2,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144…610,987,1597…

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Kaiburr

Story points are less than 20 per story

It is more effective to have story points less than 20 per story, however where in the places the story points are more than 20 per story are not much effective. Kaiburr rule engine runs this rule and highlights the rule which has story points more than 20 per story.

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Projected Vs Actual End-to-End Initiative Cost

One other fantastic rule Kaiburr offers is the Projected Cost vs Actual Cost. This’s totally calculated by the time on stories. If the time tracking is available, then Kaiburr helps to calculate the Projected vs Actual Initiative cost. However, where the time tracking on stories are missing, Kaiburr helps to identify the stories and highlight them.

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With just 15 minutes of configuration, Kaiburr produces real time actionable insights on end-to-end software delivery with 350+ KPIs, 600+ best practices and AI/ML models. Kaiburr integrates with all the tools used by the enterprise Agile teams to collect the metadata and generates digital insights with a sophisticated next generation business rules engine.

Reach us at contact@kaiburr.com to get started with metrics driven continuous improvement in your organization.