Story points are not time estimates — they are relative size estimates. The distinction sounds subtle but fundamentally changes how you plan and why velocity is a team metric, not an individual one.
By the end of this lesson you will facilitate a planning poker session, explain why story points measure complexity not time, calculate team velocity from historical sprints, use velocity for sprint capacity planning, and respond to stakeholder requests for date commitments based on velocity.
story points is the foundation of Day 4. Every concept that follows builds on the mental model you establish here. The most effective approach is to understand the principle first, then apply it — skipping straight to implementation creates gaps that compound into confusion later.
Work through each example in this lesson sequentially. The concepts connect, and the order is deliberate. If something is unclear, slow down at that point rather than pushing past it — a ten-minute pause now saves hours of debugging later.
Understanding story points requires seeing it in motion. The code below is not a complete application — it is a minimal, working illustration of the key mechanism. Study the pattern, run it, break it deliberately, then fix it. That cycle builds real comprehension.
Once the basic pattern works, the logical next step is planning poker. This is where the abstraction becomes useful — you move from understanding the mechanism to applying it to real problems. The transition is usually smaller than it feels. Most of the hard work happened in Section 1.
velocity tracking completes today's picture. It is where story points and planning poker converge into a pattern you can apply to novel problems. This integration step is often where the day's learning consolidates — if the earlier sections felt abstract, this one typically makes them click.
Implementing story points alone handles the happy path. Real systems encounter edge cases, invalid input, and unexpected state. Missing planning poker means missing those guards.
Combining story points with planning poker gives you a complete, defensible implementation. The extra lines cost ten minutes; the robustness they add is worth hours of debugging time.
Several mistakes appear consistently when engineers encounter Estimation & Velocity for the first time. Recognizing them now costs nothing; encountering them in production costs hours.
Two intensive days (Thu–Fri) with an instructor who has taught thousands of engineers. Cohorts in 5 cities, June–June–October 2026 (Thu–Fri).
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