Story Point Recommendations

[Raoul Kaiser]

We used to create the following structure in Jira with the greenhopper plugin.

• Epic(Build a driver screen)
  
  • Story (Build the UI for driver Screen)
    • Sub-Task (Portal Layout)
    • Sub-task (Add fields, labels, & controls)
  • Story (Build the Web Service for the UI)
    • Sub-task (create Junits, DAO's, and DO's)
  • Story (Integrate UI and WS)

Now that greenhopper can link stories under an epic I want to create the following structures in Jira with the greenhopper plugin because it looks much cleaner.

• Epic (Build a screen)
  
  • Story (Build a driver screen)
    
    • Task (Build the UI for driver Screen)
      • Sub-Task (Portal Layout)
      • Sub-task (Add fields, labels, & controls)
    • Task (Build the Web Service for the UI)
      • Sub-task (create Junits, DAO's, and DO's)
    • Task (Integrate UI and WS)

Previously we would only estimate and assign story points to Stories, but now that they will be considered tasks should I estimate the tasks and roll them up into a value for a story? Or Should I estimate the story as well. What are your opinions?

[John Garcia · Accepted solution]

The key is that you want Story Points to relate to closing stories, which means delivering value to the customer. Therefore, building the driver screen (as its component parts have no customer value until its complete) is the Story. While this may seem too vague when you may want the finer velocity control of monitoring every task, that's actually kind of micro-managing and is in violation of the social contract represented by Scrum.

[Raoul Kaiser]

I completely agree with your philosophy and has been the path I have been on since we implemented Scrum. How do I get developers to embrace the vagueness of a story and estimate on that instead of more of a finite effort? How do you get your product owner to accept that vague effort and communicate it to upper level management?

That is where I am currently stuck and asked for opinions. Thank you for your thoughts.

[John Garcia]

I think this is where estimating velocity and getting more accurate comes in.

[Timothy]

It's really up to you but I would sugges the lowest level possible to measure the estimates. Estimating a Story is not as fine as estimating at the task level.