Monday, March 5, 2012

The man-day and the story point relativity.

In scrum, we no longer calculate the total work in a "static" way, we rather use a relative approach, the size of each story is calculated based on other stories. Usually the smaller story serves as a baseline to calculate the rest.

This is an excellent way of making progress visible, depending on how many story points you burn per sprint, you can see when all stories could eventually be finished. Measuring work this way also helps business see what is the impact of them changing their minds by adding or reducing scope.

It also helps in giving a comparison between sprints, knowing if you're improving or, inversely, reducing your velocity, thus allowing the scrum master to take proper action.

But in every project there is a very important variable, budget. So, how you convert story points into budget needed for your project, or better, can you?