Agile, story points, and rock-n-roll.

Being an agile coach is filled with plenty of expressive moments.  You have to deal with difficult emotions and move change through an organization that is satisfied with the status quo.  Other times a coach or scrum master must deal with the practical matters of scheduling a meeting and facilitating a retrospective.  Finally, you are learning new things and applying them to your clients.  My vision of how story points work has changed over the years.  Recently, I am looking at story points in a new way, and it is good enough to share.

My first thoughts about story point made me think of them as measures of volume.  A story point contained a certain number of hours, and converting the two back and forth would be easy. After my first 18 months as a scrum master, I saw the folly in that way of doing things.  It became apparent that story points represented something analogous to distance.  An Olympic runner can cover 3,000 meters in under four minutes.  I can walk it in about a half hour.  Story points provided a quantitative way to measure uncertainty and help communicate to upper management.

Now I see a, I see a story point as the sum of four factors:complexity, risk, uncretainty, and effort.  We sum all these factors together and round them up to the nearest whole number in a Fibonacci sequence.

So if I wrote it out a math formula it would look like this:

Story Point = Complexity + Risk + Effort + Uncertainty
F_N = [Story Point]

Where F_N is a number in a Fibonacci sequence.

The new acronym for this is CRÜE, after the rock band Mötley Crüe.  By today’s standards, this giant of 1980s glam metal would flame out in the public eye.  The band was nihilistic, misogynistic, and poster children for the destruction of alcohol and drugs could do to a person.  Finally, the lead singer killed someone in the act of vehicular manslaughter.  In spite of all the baggage, you could count on the band to put on a great show.  You could also count on them blaring out of any stereo at a house party during the 1980s. People of a certain age have memories of significant life events happening with Mötley Crüe playing in the background.

As an agile coach, I will let the young people concern themselves with sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll.  It is not my lifestyle.  I prefer agile, story points, and rock-n-roll.  If you are talking about story points, talk about Crüe; complexity, risk, uncertainty, and effort.

Rock on people and until next time.