Agile Story Points and their use as a metric

Hi all again,

In my last post I wrote about what is an actionable metric and what we should consider a vanity metric. I closed the post asking what you think about story points in Agile methodologies. Are they a vanity metric or an actionable metric?

Story points are units of measurement that allow expressing an estimate of the total effort that the team will have to make to fully implement a backlog item. It's an abstract and highly subjective concept depending on the person or the team. Therefore, as a unit of measurement, a story point is a metric.

I'm not going to question the relevance of the story points. I'm a strong believer of Agile methodologies and story points are a key concept of them.

But when we manage one Agile project, we have to be very careful if we don't provide the proper context when we use story points. Therefore, story points by themselves are a vanity metric. Remember the two questions that I presented in the last post that will help us to analyze a metric: "how story points help my business?" and "how can I change my strategy based on the information that story points give me?". No one of these two questions has a proper answer when we just talk about story points.

Let's provide more context. Look at the following graph:

It's a burn up chart. This chart shows the work done and left by one team or several teams to an agile project. It's a very useful graph because it allows us to manage the work of a team and it allows us to make realistic decisions about the pending work and the expectations around it. It's based only on story points.

Taking as example, this graph has to be read as:

• We are right now in the Sprint 15 of our project.
• The green line shows the total amount of Story Points that has to be done to complete the project backlog.
• The red line shows that amount of work that we have already done (around 65%).
• Ideally, we have to finish the work in the Sprint 23, that is when blue line (ideal velocity to finish on time) and green line join.
• With the current average of story points per sprint, we will finish in the Sprint 25 (when green line and yellow line join).

We are talking only about story points but when we have more context, they are providing valuable information that allow us to make decisions. For instance, because we know that we have a 2 Sprint delay, we can increase the team's capacity to accelerate (not always works) or we can review the backlog to de-scope something or we can just assume the delay.

I hope you really enjoy this reading. I took this example of my professional day-to-day real experience. Below you have the table where I put together all this story points information. I usually download the information from the Backlog Management System (JIRA, Service Now, ...) and process it directly in Excel using formulas.

Regards :-)