One of the most import activity of each scrum team is assigning the story point to each user story. A story point is an abstract measure of effort required to implement a user story. In simple terms, it is a number that tells the team about the difficulty level of the story.
The problem, of course, is that the development team need to do this together. Doing this requires some form of negotiation.
Due to the Oxford Advanced American Dictionary, Negotiation is a formal discussion between people who are trying to reach an agreement.
Negotiation sometimes leads to conflict. The reason why negotiation sometimes leads to conflict is that people when they negotiate, will negotiate a position and then get very locked into one position and won’t budge from that one position.
Based on my experience, I recommend instead of negotiating a specific position, each development team member should negotiate how to achieve the sprint goal instead of their interests.
Scrum Master as a facilitator must:
Remove any impediment which prevents Clear and Effective Communication
The development team must have the ability to communicate clearly and effectively to each other during the negotiation. Misunderstandings can occur if each team member does not state his/her case clearly.
Take off any obstacle which makes a problem with Collaboration and Teamwork
Negotiations aren’t usually one hand versus another. Those involved in negotiations on both sides of the issue need to work together to find a satisfactory solution.
As an example, imaging scrum team is going to add functionality based on the product owner request which has been requested by the customer, but for this, the UI must change. The team is now going to negotiate or estimate the story. One of the team members is thinking that this is a really simple task, and this will have maybe two or three story points. He/she is thinking that this will take maybe one day’s worth of effort. However another development team member says this is an important feature and it’s so complex and we really can’t fool ourselves this is a monumental feature, it’s going to take a minimum of one week or more to do, this is going to be something like 12 or 18 story points.
As you can see in this example, the problem is most likely one of the team members will become embarrassed to offer such a low estimate.
To estimate user stories and assign the appropriate story points to them scrum team need to come up with a facility that helps them humans negotiate and avoids the loudmouth, dominating personality problem. They can do that with something called agile estimation techniques. Some of the well-known and useful agile estimation techniques are:
1. Planning Poker
2. T-Shirt Size
3. Dot Voting
4. The Bucket System
5. Three-point method (Large/Uncertain/Small)
6. Affinity Mapping
7. Ordering method
If you are keen to know more about agile estimation techniques, please see Robbrecht van Amerongen post about 7 Agile Estimation Techniques — beyond Planning Poker
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