Comments on: Establishing a Common Baseline for Story Points

By: Daryl

Daryl — Fri, 21 Jan 2011 04:17:55 +0000

Thanks for the validation Mike – that is actually what I was proposing to do

By: Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 16:59:02 +0000

Hi Daryl–
I always tell teams to start by looking for something they want to call a “2″. Something that is small but not the smallest. You and I might differ on how long it’s going to take but we can both agree it’s pretty small. Then look for a 5–something about twice as big. Again you and I differ on how long it will take but we can agree it will take twice as long as what we agreed was a two. Establish these two items just via simple discussion. Then start using Planning Poker on the rest using those as the initial baseline.

By: Daryl

Daryl — Thu, 20 Jan 2011 07:55:22 +0000

Hi Mike,

We are going to attempt to baseline user story points using user stories from different parts of our product. Is it good to have a reference user story where we say that user story A is 16 then the estimators can derive their estimates for the other items there? The common question for teams here is usually, what does a 2..etc means, many find it hard to grasp the idea of relative sizing. Unless a reference point is given to them.

Thanks.

By: Hemant Mishal

Hemant Mishal — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 11:09:10 +0000

Hi Mike,
Thanks a lot for your reply, it means i can create a table with user story at left hand and on the right hand I can put different project names in columns and what the size is for the user story for that project.

Thanks again.

By: Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 07:51:05 +0000

Hi Hemant–
You can still use this approach. If “implement feature x” takes twice as long in C++ as it would in Visual Basic, put twice the story points on it.

By: Hemant Mishal

Hemant Mishal — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 05:06:32 +0000

Hi Mike,

In the above post you mentioned about creating baseline user stories that can be unreal in the beginning and later on can be added with real ones. We are working on products in one domain but technology, architecture or tools used in the development is different for most of them. In this case how these base lines user stories will help? Since time required to implement one user story in one technology will be different in another technology.

Please suggest.

By: Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 13:27:59 +0000

Hi Devi- A story that would have been estimated as 6 two sprints ago should still be estimated as 6 today. With relative estimating, new items are estimated in comparison to all previously estimated stories. You build your reference as you go. Find an item you want to call a 2 (leaving room below for ones). Then find something you want to call a 5. Do this through full-team discussion. Then use a technique like Planning Poker to estimate the rest of your product backlog.

By: Devi

Devi — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 13:16:05 +0000

Hi,

We have been working on a scrum project for a year now and ideal days seemed to be working. But ideal days have become more of actuals and we have no data for user story sizing to do meaningful trend. Some of my team members do not think story points would solve the problem because it would again be specific to team and we can’t be assured that our reference would remain unchanged. for eg. if 2 sprints ago a userstory was say 6 points, today it might be 3 because the team is more comfortable in that type of functionality and would find it relatively easy. Does the story point sizing work only if we have built a reference at the start – with the product backlog?

By: Mike Cohn

Mike Cohn — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:36:03 +0000

Hi Sonali–
I want to be careful is saying the baseline is replaced as you do above. It hasn’t been replaced. Rather we’ve added to the set of items we can compare against. Think about this this way: Suppose we are standing in a city park. I point to a tree and say “that tree is 1 unit away.” I point to a farther tree and say that tree is 3 away. Looking in the other direction, I point to a table and say that the table is also 3 away. Next you point to something and think it’s about as far as the table so you call it 3 away as well. All 3-unit items should be equally distant from us, even though compared to the table rather than to the initially baselined 3.

By: Sonali

Sonali — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 14:47:48 +0000

Hi Mike,
Thanks for this interesting post. In one of the reply you have mentioned that once we start into iteration we can refer to the recent US implemented in last iteration to compare & to come up with size estimation for the US in current sprint. That means the baseline that would have been established at the beginning of the project can be replaced with the new ones.
But does that mean we establish & publish new baseline every time it changes from original or it’s left to the team to decide to choose which one to compare with ?