Who is the referee in a scrum team? especially in story points, and whether there is a substitute for story points, especially for performance measurement Saving Changes...
What is it that you want a referee to do? The scrum master is the closest you're going to get to a referee. However, while the scrum master may be able to cry foul, the scrum master does not penalize the team.
What do you want done with story points? The scrum master can facilitate sizing and work with the team to achieve consensus on story size, but does not dictate size.
While I would never use velocity as a performance measure, monitoring burn down/up does inform you on progress. Cycle time can be a useful measure, and there are a few different ways to measure defects. Saving Changes...
Senior Projects Manager | Field & Marten AssociatesNew Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Dhimas
Like Kiron said, self-organizing teams have the autonomy to decide on story points as a team and measure their velocity then inspect and adapt. Teams do concentrate on measuring value delivered and use velocity to estimate their future sprints.
I concur with my colleague. At the end of the day, the product owner is responsible for the quality of the backog. The team as a whole helps the PO reach that point.
Have you considered letting the team review the individual performances? (When I took a Team Dynamics course at Ottawa University, our prof gave each of us 10% of our grade to distribute among the team members, as we saw fit.) Saving Changes...
Sergio Luis ConteHelping to create solutions for everyone| Worldwide based OrganizationsBuenos Aires, Argentina
My recommendation is: try to avoid user stories and story points. With that said, I am using them from long time ago but just because, after making an initial analysis, the team decide to use it. If you decide to use it then take time to teach all the team about what to use them really means. With that said, the other big mistake you can see outside there is trying to convert storie points to other type of things like hours or days. Is a big mistake. So, returning to your question, there is not "referee". The whole team have to agree in the way to assign story points to user stories just in case there is not convergence after 3-4 rounds. Just to add something you can find works done long time ago about to adjust story points by use case points and function points just in case you are working in software projects. Saving Changes...
Ahamed SajidHead of Customer Success & Solution Delivery| Aufait TechnologiesKozhikode, Kl, India
Hi Team,
I tried implementing Story points for my team. But at the end of the day, after a few iterations, it's getting connected to effort rates. Even the client start considering story points in terms of effort.
We are into Service projects, and not product development. Usually, milestones are defined by the deliverables. which are broken down into stories that are targeted for each sprint. During Sprint planning sessions, we follow 3 Point estimates, which seems working pretty well so far, except for certain Stories, where related risks are identified during the planning phase.
For these types of projects, is Story points-based estimates really an essential part of getting in tune with deliverables? Kindly share your thoughts. :) Saving Changes...
Nils HyomaAgile Coach| Novatec Consulting GmbHHamburg, Hamburg, Germany
In an ideal world "Story Points" of an item are chosen by consensus of the team. Saving Changes...
Relative sizing using story points is just one approach for determining how much work the team can take on or has accomplished in the past.
If your work items are all roughly the same size, you might be better off looking at metrics such as work item aging and throughput.
I'd also evaluate whether Scrum is the appropriate framework for the nature of your work. Fixed time boxes encourage batch work and a flow-focused approach is what your team will eventually want to aspire to.
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