What Do Points Make?

When working in or with a scrum team talking about, debating about and on occasion arguing about points is common place.

Ultimately the ability to deliver points is a strong indictor for a team in terms of a velocity but its important to appreciate what this measure should represent and also importantly what it doesn't represent it.

Effort or Complexity?

An often debated aspect of pointing is whether they should represent complexity or effort.

I believe ultimately its difficult for team members to remain focused on one particular criteria when giving a points estimate, they are likely to consciously or sub-consciously be taking many factors into account complexity, effort and time to name a few.

For this reason we should see points as simply representing the currency of the work a team can get through in a sprint, each point representing a unit of work to be achieved.

Relativity and consistency are the most important aspects of pointing, points are unit-less, providing a 13 point story is more work for the team then an 8 or 5 point story and providing two 13 point stories represent roughly equivalent pieces of work then pointing is serving its purpose.

The exact reasons the team are choosing a points value is not necessarily relevant providing they are consistent in the application of those reasons.

Everything is Work

If we are going to have an accurate measure of the work a team can achieve we need to ensure all tasks that require more than a trivial amount of work carry a points value.

Sometimes we are tempted into indulging in creative accounting because we feel we want to ensure some piece of work is put into a sprint whether this be a bug fix, sorting out some technical debt or doing some refactoring.

But we can't achieve work with zero effort and ultimately in our attempt to fix or improve our code base we may very well have the opposite effect when more stories are added to an apparently under filled sprint even though we already have a lot of work on our plate.

If we generate a lot of technical debt or bugs the points value this work carries is a direct measure of the price we must pay to fix these things and should act as encouragement to not incur these charges.

Points Aren't Prizes

The purpose of a scrum team isn't simply to score points, it is to achieve business outcomes. At the start of every sprint the teams velocity represents a budget that can be spent to achieve these outcomes.

All members of the team can and should play a role in deciding how best to spend that budget in order to achieve value for money, in the form of a well defined MVP, and to create some investment opportunities for future sprint delivery.

It is all too easy to construct a sprint that achieves a lot of points but has very little tangible benefit, its not the case that at the end of every sprint we have to have a new feature or widget but we do need to understand how we have moved forward and how this will flow into the next sprint.

Points are a mechanism to use in planning to provide estimates and judge how much work to commit to in an iteration, they are not the only measure by which a team should be judged.