If you google the main aspects that go into story pointing, you’ll quickly see your story points should primarily reflect your team’s agreement on the risks, complexity, and repetition involved with the proposed work.
There’s a lot out there that you can read about in more detail on this, but here I simply want to share a list of 7 questions to ask during story pointing that I’ve found are both practical and helpful that you can start using today. Here they are.
- How much of an impact will this have if it doesn’t work correctly? On Revenue? Churn? Brand? And how easy is it to remedy?
- When is this change going to be triggered/exercised and cause impact? When/how will the user know if there is a problem? Immediately? Downstream?
- Is there another way the user can do this thing? (Think are there other scenarios/paths to consider? Duplicate logic anywhere? Is a workaround already known and in place?)
- How has this feature/story come about? Have the individual pieces been tested before it was put together? If so, how?
- What are the non-functional requirements? Performance, security, accessibility?
- What are the different user types and user roles/permissions that will be part of this change?
- What are the needed test data attributes for this change? How easy can they be had?
BONUS QUESTION: Is this change dependent on another change recently made, and is that change working as expected? (Think when would this story’s testing be overkill.)