Disclaimer: all the statistics below are deliberately not exact, but rather based on the gut feelings (for multiple reasons).
We seem to have come to an interesting situation: the distribution of our stories' sizes is very lopsided.
After breaking down all the "epics", we appear to end up with:
- Almost no 1 Story Points;
- Very few 2 and 3 SPs;
- Even fewer 5 SPs;
- The majority of stories being 8 SPs;
- Quite a significant number of 13 SPs (and that's the highest estimated effort before getting into the "epics" area).
So, bottom line: most of the stories in our backlogs (probably, 70-80%) seem to be 8-13 SPs, with the remainder being primarily 3 SP-ers.
And - just to eliminate this topic from the discussion - no, this phenomenon doesn't seem to be a product of so-called "story point inflation". 8 and 13 SP-ers are really that.
And - just to eliminate this topic from the discussion - no, this phenomenon doesn't seem to be a product of so-called "story point inflation". 8 and 13 SP-ers are really that.
In my opinion, this is quite an unhealthy situation, with a multitude of drawbacks:
