So my team and I are quite new to Scrum and today moved from estimating in Ideal Hours to Story Points. All seems sound rationale, BUT with timeboxed activities. Here is the case, we have an extremelly complex User Story that needs a spike so to explore underlying technical unknowns. With Ideal Hours it would be easy: timebox it to one ideal day (8 ideal hours). Now we want to account the exploratory work towards our velocity. So, the pressing question is how do we give Story Points to a timeboxed activity? Constraint: we do not know how to translate this 1 ideal day into Story Points because our historical data is badly collected and does not reflect reality.
How to estimate a timeboxed spike using story points?
scrum;estimation;user story
Personal opinion here, but firstly I prefer to think in terms of complexity rather than story points. I think story points can mean different things to different people so there can be a point (no pun intended!) of confusion when talking about them and estimating based on them.Secondly, I would not worry about estimating a spike. I would just give it some time (as per your 8 hours) and see what pops out the other end. I don't think you can assign complexity to it because the idea is to find out what the complexity of it is. Otherwise you would not need it.Thirdly, I would not be including spikes in velocity calculations. Simply because I would expect every spike to be different and I don't necessarily expect a result from a spike. So I think including that time could distort your velocity. I would just write that time off the same way I would write off time if a developer is away sick.