Calibrate Story Points With Anchor Stories
Estimate a new story by comparing it to anchor stories and naming the uncertainty that changes its size.
The team is estimating from personal time guesses instead of a shared relative scale. Choose clear anchors, compare the new story against them, and adjust for uncertainty before naming a point value. The common shortcut is to vote first and explain later. That creates noisy spreads because each person is using a private reference frame. It may still produce a number, but the team learns little about why the story is that size or whether the estimate is stable enough for sprint planning. Anchor stories slow the start of the conversation by a minute and speed the rest by much…
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