How to decide on how many story points to give to a user story or a task?

[Monica Shiralkar]

I understand that story points are given based on whether the user story is complex or simple or medium. How to decide on how much story points to give to a user story or a task.Thanks

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Your team needs to agree on what story points mean. As long as they make sense relating to each other.

So maybe 1 is change a label, 2 is write a back end api, 3 is add a table to a screen with corresponding data and 5 is solve a problem you don't fully understand yet. As long as you make reference points with your team, you'll be able to calculate your velocity and the size to stories to each other.

[Monica Shiralkar]

Jeanne Boyarsky wrote:
So maybe 1 is change a label, 2 is write a back end api, 3 is add a table to a screen with corresponding data and 5 is solve a problem you don't fully understand yet.

Thanks.
And would such kind of agreed mapping be documented somewhere since any new person joining the team would be clueless that what is the agreed upon mapping that is being followed?

[Jeanne Boyarsky]

Yes. I have a table that I go over with new people. Also, we make frequent references to our baseline at sprint planning. So we will say things like "that's 5 story points because there's a lot of uncertainty about how to do it" or "that's 2 story points because it always is" (we have some recurring tasks)

[Monica Shiralkar]

Can the mapping simply be like high complexity user story  means say 5 story points , medium complexity story means 3 story points and Low complexity story means 1 story points ?

[Paul Clapham]

Sure, that sounds like a reasonable thing to do. Basically, as you've probably guessed, the rule is like "More work, more points".

The other thing that I can see from what's been posted so far is, keep it simple.

[Monica Shiralkar]

May be I will get more idea on this by reading about planning pocker too.