Have you ever attempted explaining Story Points to a new Agile team? It can be an incredibly frustrating experience. Perhaps that is a result of the Story Point being an arbitrary unit of measure, or perhaps I’m just bad at it.

I remember in a CSM class once we walked through the Dog Points Exercise. If you aren’t familiar with it, this seemingly harmless exercise typically appears as the CST wraps up his Story Point section. The class is split up into small groups and a list of dogs is projected onto the screen. The groups are given no instructions other than to classify the dogs. Some teams use color as their criteria, however I find that most teams use size. Each dog is compared to the next dog on the list, and grouped based on relative size. This should have been a straightforward exercise, however our CST decided to throw “Scooby Doo” in as a dog, and we spent the majority of our time arguing about his size due to Scooby’s 2 dimensional nature.

I’ve also seen coaches try to use the Pile of Dirt metaphor with horrendous results. At a basic level, envision multiple piles of dirt in a room. Why is there dirt in the room, who knows just pay attention. So depending on how many people you have to help, and how strong they are, what types of tools they have, it can take various amounts of time to move each pile. About the time you start deep diving into Joe has a teaspoon and Mike has a bulldozer your audience has most likely shut down their brains. Your dirt might as well have left on a train from Boston going 72mph to meet the other piles of dirt.

One exercise that is somewhat successful is the T-Shirt model. Everyone understands T-Shirts right? You imagine your Story Points falling into sizes such as XS, S, M, L & XL instead of numbers. This can be a rather useful method until they start applying the fibonacci scale to the sizes. Is M size a 2 or a 3, why isn’t there a 4? Please don’t ask me why there isn’t a 4. Dr Fibonacci was a deranged individual ok? Just write the T-Shirt Size to Point mapping on the wall so we’ll not forget it again during our next Release Planning Session.

Oh and that reminds me, did I mention that Story Points are only useful in Release Planning? This concept is fairly useless when it comes near term planning. Even Mike Cohn suggests to use Hours instead of Points when Sprint Planning.

It seems that some days I struggle to find the point to Story Points…