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tfsscrumtfs-2015

Feature list shows both Effort and Story Points. What's the difference?

I thought that story points showed the effort (relative number) to put into a user story, but TFS 2015 have both Effort and Story Points. What to use when? What's the difference?

Detail view of a Product Backlog Item (user story?) shows only an Effort field, but the Feature list shows both (I might have customized the columns, I don't know if both is shown by standard!)

NB: I might be interchanging XP and Scrum terminology! Do say so, if I do!

Running TFS 2015 version 14.0.24712.0

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Solution

  • The Scrum Guide doesn't say a great deal about what estimating approach to take. For this reason a lot of people doing Scrum have adopted the story points approach that comes from XP. But that is not the only approach to estimating that can be taken.

    Another common approach is to combine both story points and time-based estimates. TFS seems to be set up to support this particular approach.

    This is how that particular combined approach works:

    Story points are used to estimate the relative size of stories. At the end of each sprint the team works out how many stories they completed and uses the total story points done to calculate a velocity. This velocity is then used as a guide to what the team can fit in to future sprints.

    Once a Scrum team have completed the story point estimates they then go on to break each story down in to tasks. They then do time-based estimates on the tasks (e.g. Task 1 = 2 hours). There are several reasons for doing these task-level estimates:

    • The process of estimating tasks often draws out some design and implementation details
    • The task-level estimates may indicate that one particular discipline (e.g. testers) has been overloaded in the sprint
    • The task-level estimates also serve as a check that the story point approach hasn't overloaded a particular sprint (e.g. the team put 20 story points in which is usually fine, but when they did the task-level estimates they realised it is too much work)

    This approach is particularly popular with teams that are first starting out with Scrum. A lot of teams start out using this approach and then drop the task-level estimates when they get more used to working with Scrum.

    TFS is set up to work well with this particular approach, but that does not mean it is the only way you can estimate in Scrum.