How are estimation points defined for a work item?
In Agile, before starting a sprint, the team should discuss how many points to assign to each story. These points indicate the amount and complexity of the work required and its risks. Agile teams usually define their points using the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8,...) or in sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL).
The effort required will vary across teams.The project management team might find the story easy, but the development and testing teams may find it more difficult to complete. Points are estimated by the team members during the sprint plan meeting.
You need to develop a 'User profile page' and 'Payments page'. Both these stories require creating a number of fields. Which story would require more effort? The 'Payments page' require multiple fields that are correlated to each other, so this will be more work. You'll need to create the credit/debit card details section, CVV section (input will vary by country), and the mobile number section to generate the OTP. There are multiple interdependent tasks to complete this story, so estimate 10 points for this story and 5 points for the 'Create personal details form'.
Estimation points vs. time
In Agile, work can be estimated in points or in hours, so what's the difference between these methods? Estimating the work in points refers to the work item's complexity or relative weighting and estimating it in hours is based on the time taken to complete the task. Estimating the work in hours depends on the person's experience or skill, whereas estimating the work in points depends on the work's relative complexity.
If two people are assigned to the same task and they evaluate it differently, simply add their estimation points together to determine how many points a work item will have.
If two people are assigned to a task 'Write a forum on project management'. It is a general topic and needs a lot of research work before they write the forum. Maria and Clary are the team members who work for this task. They both sit down to plan what is required to complete the task. They divide the work based on the experience: Maria does basic research on the PM process, contacts pertinent management personalities in town for an interview, whereas Clark collects all the customer queries, different PM tools, gathers information on the most used features in PM, and businesses that require it. Once the work is divided, they start estimating the efforts required.
Maria requires 5 days to complete her task, so she assigns it 50 points.
Clark requires 4 days to complete his task, so she assigns it 40 points.
So, the total estimated effort for the task is 90 points.
If we estimate the work by time and They work 9 hours in a day: For 5 days, it's 45 hours. Likewise, for 4 days it's 36 hours.