Story points
What story points mean — and what they do not.
Story points are a team’s shorthand for relative size. They help compare work without pretending that uncertainty can be scheduled to the hour.
A comparison, not a commitment of time
When a team calls one story an 8 and another a 3, it is expressing a relative judgement. The larger item may involve more work, more complexity, more risk, or less familiarity. It does not mean one person will take eight days or that every 8-point item has the same calendar duration.
Keeping points separate from hours matters because people, interruptions, and technical context change. A team can use its completed points over several sprints to forecast capacity while still treating each estimate as a planning input, not a promise.
Calibrate with real examples
Choose one or two finished stories that the whole team remembers. Record the reasoning behind them, not merely their number. Revisit those examples when the team changes substantially or the product enters a new technical area. Calibration is a conversation that keeps the scale internally consistent.
Do not compare points across teams
Different teams have different reference stories, skills, and constraints. Adding or ranking their points treats locally meaningful measures as if they were a shared currency. Compare outcomes, flow, and learning across teams instead; use points to plan within the group that created them.
A Fibonacci-style scale is one common way to preserve useful gaps between those comparisons.