Story points and estimating per Ron Jeffries

 This is simply a great read, pure gold from Ron Jeffries

"To me, the important thing in Real Agile is to pick the next few things to do, and do them promptly. The key question is to find the most valuable things to do, and to do them quickly. Doing them quickly comes down to doing small slices of high value, and iterating rapidly"

"This makes me think that estimation, be it in points or time, is to be avoided."

"we’d work to have a list of the few most important next things to do."

I feel we often try to do too much for completeness sakes or other reasons, when we should be ruthless about going after where the value is.

Now how do you decide what is valuable?

How do you, like a sculptor working on a slab of rock, whittle it down to fine grained pieces? Ron has advice for that too which he calls story slicing:

1. split a larger story into smaller stories 
2. work on the slices that deliver value
3. drop any that don't any value "Every set of requirements has fat in it, or items of lower value"

https://ronjeffries.com/articles/015-jul/slicing/

"Every large story has smaller stories inside it, some of higher value, some of lower. When we split them, and when we work closely with our business-side people (daily, as the Manifesto asks), it becomes easy to trim the fat out as we go."

More on story splitting

Move the conversation from size and effort to value. "Keeping the conversation focused on value generates very different stories from a conversation focused on story size and implementation tasks."

"Bin, Thin or Split" - I like simple phrases like that the team can adopt as their own

The work to breakdown/split a story is for the whole team, not just engineers breaking into tech stories. When we do the latter we miss the opportunity to figure out the stories that deliver value.

https://3p72t53zzqr23puj171gfblg-wpengine.netdna-ssl.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Story-Splitting-Flowchart-2.pdf