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Story Points vs Hours: Choose wisely to turn your nightmare assessment project into a blessing

This blog covers the difference between Story Points vs Hours for Agile Estimation. Read why Bacancy uses traditional hours over story points, how it’s helpful

By Rachael GreyPublished 3 years ago 4 min read
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People have terrible self-esteem, mostly unconsciously; however, we can try to be more compassionate to ourselves, and accept the dynamic nature of all things that exist, instead of letting our head hit this involuntary human being. Project evaluation is a difficult task. Companies often blend the two main methods of project evaluation: the traditional method of surveying projects in hours or time and the new method of historical scoring.

Although Bacancy Technology uses the traditional clock method when evaluating agile projects, this blog post focuses on historical points and hours. Still, 9 agile scoring methods use the new agile story scoring technology. The nine technologies are:

1. Planning Poker

2. The Bucket Method

3. Big/Uncertain/Small

4. TFB / NFC / 1 (Sprint)

5. Dot Voting

6. T-Shirt Sizes

7. Affinity Mapping

8. Ordering Protocol

9. Divide until Supreme Size or Less

Traditional time estimation

As developers and connoisseurs, we know that traditional estimation involves a bottom-up approach to produce near-accurate project estimates. With a bottom-up approach, every aspect of the project needs to be examined in great detail to answer the obvious questions that all customers ask themselves: "How long does the project take?

These details usually include the skills of everyone involved in the project. The project work speed, availability, and possibility of emergency. This helps managers to accurately estimate the progress of a particular project in hours or days. Now let us understand the relationship between project history and hours in detail.

Agile story scoring method

The agile scoring method uses the opposite method, called the top-down method. In this case, the score depends on the complexity of the project or the amount of work required to complete it. This evaluation method is based on the principle of relativity. For example, the difficulty of question A depends on the difficulty of question B.

This way, you can give the customer a rough estimate of the difficulty. The team checks every aspect of the project related to other aspects of the project.

This study measures the difficulty of one story versus another and how much effort is required to complete it.

Why is the story point considered a more trustworthy estimate method than the clock?

A common and frequent misunderstanding of the story scoring method is that it provides the team with more freedom than other tasks and related user stories. Accurately define the talents associated with each task. Because the Story Points method focuses more on problem-solving skills rather than completing a specific task at a specific time, it is considered more generous and adjustable than time.

What is a story point?

Historic points are a different perspective of agile software development. These are symbolic units of measurement for application characteristics or requirements. These characteristics or requirements in agile software growth are called user stories.

The arbitrary unit of analysis for these user stories reflects the difficulty or complexity of the team. They also cover the labor expected to achieve a particular story. Since Scrum's historical features do not reflect exact hours, the Scrum team can abstractly assume that this should reduce the pressure integrated with the evaluation process.

Why use story points above hours?

Some companies choose projects within a few hours because their selected method of evaluating projects is that humans are naturally required to compose smart decisions and control the entire process. The evaluation method allows you to compare developed and ongoing stories.

The purpose of this comparison is to enable team members to collaborate and communicate persuasively. Let's look at this in a typical employee interview, which is common in almost all companies.

Why does Bacancy Technology use traditional watch methods instead of historical glasses?

The simple explanation for comparing Scrum scores to clocks is that the smartest tech specialists know best about technology and how the human mind works. At Bacancy, our team members have various encounters. Therefore, an hourly rating is a wise choice because, unlike plot rating methods, it can be customized to suit all kinds of experience and skill levels. When choosing between Agile History Points and Watches, Bacancy favors the watch method because our customers are more familiar with the watch method than the history point method.

Here are more reasons why Bacancy Technology hours are more important than drawing timepieces:

  • Easier to learn
  • Project managers and companies can associate hours with days more easily because of awareness.
  • Easier to practice for teams that often see team members coming and going.
  • Accuracy Versus Points eliminates the deviation of the integration method.

To conclude, although this long-lasting debate about story points vs hours is often in a gray area, Bacancy Technology synchronizes with Jeffries, saying that historical points are often abused, and we can dodge several traps by not utilizing historical measures at all. There is little sense to your team or company. I suggest you leave them on the floor because they are useless. On the other hand, if you love it, then go ahead!

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About the Creator

Rachael Grey

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  • Olivia Anderson 11 months ago

    Hello Rachael! Great article on the importance of choosing between story points and hours for effective project assessment! The insights shared help in transforming a nightmare assessment project into a blessing. Although both approaches have their merits, this article (https://www.cleveroad.com/blog/software-development-time-estimation/) provides valuable information on software development time estimation, which complements the topic discussed and offers additional guidance for successful project planning.

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