Or “How do we improve our point based estimates and resultant velocity?”
For many organizations, we focus on making Story Points a true measure of the relative size of the work, and velocity as the true capacity of the team to complete requirements to done.
Most organizations settle on a team-by-team Story Point based approach to estimate work. These estimates are used to understand how much the team can deliver in a Sprint / Iteration. The capacity to deliver working code, called the Team Velocity is determined by summing the Team estimates of User Stories that are Done in a Sprint / Iteration.
We come to rely on this information for a number of uses. For example it helps us plan and understand how Teams are doing. A number of Teams have reported issues in both calculating and using Story Points. The following approaches were pulled together from 2 primary sources:
This page is a summary of what was discovered on the approaches Teams have used to improve their estimation process.
Here is a list, in no particular order of things that someone has tried or suggested as a way of improving something about the estimation process: