Beware of stale story points

Like baked good that have been around for too long story points also go stale. The expiration date for story points is typically four to six sprints after the stories are pointed. Once the points go stale, they should be removed from the story, and the story needs to be re-refined and repointed.


After time has passed, the team will often point a story differently because of what they have learned from other work they have done in the intervening time. The team may now want to take a different approach to the story, so re-refining the story is the place to start.


In a similar vein, when your team starts working on a project that they recently inherited from another team, all points assigned to stories by the previous owners of the project are, by definition, stale. Each team is unique in its knowledge and abilities so each team needs to assign points based on the effort they feel the story will take to complete. Additionally, teams often point differently, so the points one team assigns a story has no relationship to the points another team would assign it.


Stale story points are also a reason that it is important to balance between having enough stories pointed so that the team has enough work to pull in during Sprint Planning and planning too many stories out into the future. Always having about 2 sprints worth of stories pointed is a good balance between those.


Morale of the story: If a story on your backlog is pointed and your team hasn’t pointed it within the last 4 - 6 sprints, delete the points, re-refine the story when it is close enough to the top of the backlog and repoint the story.​ 


Stagy Agile.

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