Story pointing in Agile — For Business Analyst

Story pointing is a technique used in Agile development to estimate the relative effort of delivering a user story. As a business analyst, you can follow these steps to do story pointing:

1. Understand the user story: As a business analyst, your first step is to understand the user story that needs to be estimated. You should know the acceptance criteria, the expected outcome, and the user’s perspective.

2. Break down the user story: Once you have a good understanding of the user story, break it down into smaller, more manageable tasks or sub-tasks. This will help you estimate the effort required for each task more accurately.

3. Estimate the effort: Use a consensus-based approach to estimate the effort required for each task. Get your team together and assign points to each task based on the complexity and effort required to complete it. The most common point system used is the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21), but you can choose any other point system that works for your team.

4. Assign story points: Once you have estimated the effort for each task, add up the points for each task to get the total story points for the user story.

5. Review and finalize: Review the estimates with your team and adjust them as needed based on the feedback. Finalize the story points and assign them to the user story.

6. Monitor progress: Keep track of the progress of the tasks during development and update the story points if needed. This will help you improve your estimates for future user stories.

Story pointing is not an exact science, and it is important to focus on relative effort rather than absolute effort. The goal is to get a rough estimate of the effort required to complete a user story, so your team can plan and prioritize their work accordingly for each sprint.