Software the Agile Way....

1. Story point estimate is an amalgamation of the amount of effort involved in developing the feature, the complexity of developing it, the risk inherent in it, and so on. 2. The first approach is to select a story that you expect to be one of the smallest stories you’ll work with and say that story is estimated at 1 story point. 3. The second approach is instead to select a story that seems somewhat medium-sized and give it a number somewhere in the middle of the range you expect to use. 4. Velocity is a measure of a team’s rate of progress. It is calculated by summing the number of story points assigned to each user story that the team completed during the iteration. If the team completed three stories each estimated at five story points then their velocity would be fifteen. If the team completed two five-point stories their velocity would be ten. 5. On any given day, in addition to working on the planned activities of a project, a team member may spend time answering em...

The purpose of velocity is to calibrate the current local value for a story point in order to facilitate planning for the near future.  This allows us to continuously deliver value and steer a project without having to put a lot of time and effort into estimation.  Estimation does not deliver any value, so the less time and effort we can get away devoting to it, the more time and effort is available for actually delivering value.  Just estimating story points and moving on without worrying much about precision is the fastest way to get on with doing the work.  The alternatives that would seem to create more order and precision to estimates never actually produce a sufficiently better outcome to justify the otherwise unnecessary time and effort required to do so.  There is, however, an alternative that even makes the little bit of time and effort required for story pointing and velocity calculation unnecessary. Just always split all stories into the approxim...

No project can go very long before someone starts asking “When will you be done?” The best approach for estimating stories would be one that: • allows us to change our mind whenever we have new information about a story • works for both epics and smaller stories • doesn’t take a lot of time • provides useful information about our progress and the work remaining • is tolerant of imprecision in the estimates • can be used to plan releases An approach that satisfies each of these goals is to estimate in story points. A nice feature of story points is that each team defines them as they see fit. Source - Mike Cohn's book