I’ve been reflecting on the role of story points in agile teams.
Backlog grooming can sometimes become longer than expected because the team needs to estimate story points, vote, and then discuss outliers when someone gives a much higher or lower point than others.
This is not necessarily wrong. Story points can be useful. But I think it’s worth asking again: what are story points really for?
From my perspective, there are two main purposes:
1. As a relative effort indicator to support sprint commitment
To represent complexity, uncertainty, dependency, and overall effort, so the team can estimate how much work can be committed within a sprint.
2. As a way to measure team velocity
To understand roughly how much work the team can deliver over time.
But I’ve also been exploring whether we can solve the same problems with a simpler approach, especially in a Scrumban setup, a hybrid between Scrum and Kanban.
For commitment, instead of relying heavily on story points, we focus more on clear user stories, acceptance criteria, and priority. The backlog is managed more like an open-ended Kanban flow, where tasks are continuously prioritized. Each team member can assess what they can realistically commit to within the sprint based on clarity, capacity, and priority, without necessarily assigning story points.
One benefit is that the team has visibility beyond the current sprint. Sometimes, when someone has capacity, they can already start picking up or preparing work for the next sprint.
For velocity, I personally feel that it can be difficult to compare objectively over time. Team capacity changes. People have different experience levels, even with the same title. Team composition may also change due to turnover. Because of this, comparing velocity across different periods is not always apple to apple.
For me, as long as the team can commit realistically and deliver the project according to the expected timeline, that is already a strong signal. Improving velocity is important, but the way we measure it may need to evolve, especially now that AI is also changing how teams work.
We’ve started applying this approach, and the early feedback from the team has been positive. The grooming process feels lighter, and the team feels more productive.
I don’t think there is one perfect approach for every team. But for our context, simplifying the process has helped us focus more on clarity, priority, and delivery.