Story points vs hours
Hi,
could someone clarify. The Scrum Guide states
"Work planned for the first days of the Sprint by the Development Team is decomposed by the end of this meeting, often to units of one day or less."
However many teams use story points for estimating tasks and not hours.
How do you reconcile the two? Do you select a story point value that would represent a day's work?
e.g. all tasks should be decomposed to 8 points or less.
I don't agree with using story points for user stories and hours for tasks, as it seems like it's over complicating things.
As I read it, the "day's work" is really just a rough estimate. The idea is just to break down tasks so they aren't in big chunks, but unlike the scrum events, this isn't a hard and fast maximum time. The guide doesn't say you *can't* have a story/task that lasts 4 days, only that it's usually more effective to break it down further.
As for actually reconciling points into hours, let's say you have a 1-month sprint. What value are you gaining by trying to determine if a task is going to take 8 hours versus 12 hours? Are story points intended to be used this way?
A Development Team should be able to forecast how much work they believe remains in their Sprint Backlog. The level of granularity should provide the transparency needed for Sprint control to be evidenced. Units of one day or less should allow the evidencing of progress during each Daily Scrum.
Estimates are made so that a Development Team can forecast, during Sprint Planning, how much work they believes they can take on. Items should be sufficiently granular to allow progress and control to be evidenced every 24 hours. Those items may be tasks or user stories or some other construct. As long as the appropriate granularity is achieved, the method used in estimation is immaterial.
We are using story points for User Stories, and hours for tasks. Each task must take max 8 hours. And everything is working just fine.
Converting SP in hours is not a correct way to deal in such a situation. Project managers are using this kind of approach; but for me project managers are old school.