Story points
A story-point estimate is a unit-less measure of relative effort assigned to a user story. Points capture complexity, uncertainty, and time taken together; they're meant to be compared within a team (not across teams). Common scales are Fibonacci (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13) and t-shirt sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL).
Story points exist because hour-based estimates set up unhealthy comparisons across teams and under-account for uncertainty. A 5-point story for one team might take a day; for another, three days — that's fine. What matters is that the team's velocity (points completed per sprint) becomes a stable planning input over time. Anti-patterns: comparing points across teams, treating points as a productivity metric, or letting points become a deadline commitment.
Long-form posts that explore story points in depth — when to use it, common failure modes, how AI helps.
- How AI writes acceptance criteria (and where it fails)The honest map of where AI is dramatically better than humans at writing acceptance criteria — and the five places it confidently writes garbage. Plus the prompts that work.10 min read
- Replacing Jira: a 30-day playbookThe honest 30-day playbook for moving off Jira. Four phases — audit, parallel run, cutover, decommission — plus the three patterns where this doesn't work.11 min read
- How long should a sprint be when using AI to write stories?1-week sprints become the right default with AI. The 2-week standard was calibrated to slow manual planning — AI changes the math.6 min read
- What's the best AI tool for sprint planning?Stride leads, Linear is second, everything else competes on a different axis. The litmus test: drop a PRD in and see what comes back in 90 seconds.6 min read
Related terms
- Velocity
A team's velocity is the average number of story points completed per sprint over a rolling window (typically the last 3-6 sprints).
- Capacity planning
Capacity planning is the practice of estimating how much work a team can realistically take on in a sprint, accounting for PTO, meetings, on-call duty, and other non-coding time.
- Story splitting
Story splitting is the practice of breaking a large user story into smaller stories that each independently deliver value.