Some outcomes will be more likely than others and you can use these numbers to come up with statements like: “41 items or more can be completed in 30 days with

Some outcomes will be more likely than others and you can use these numbers to come up with statements like: “41 items or more can be completed in 30 days with a certainty of 85%”. I did something similar recently: I started with taking the 20 tickets we closed and plotting story points vs actual time they took. Results were as follows: - 8s were mostly garbage, but consistently took more than one sprint. - 1s and 2s were also garbage but always took less than a 5. - 3s and 5s were fairly consistent, but at the same time could take up to 100% more. Conclusion: split up all 8s if possible, treat 1s and 2s as 3s. Second, I removed the outliers and created a distribution of point-per-sprint rates. The result: 5.6 points per sprint with a standard deviation of 2.5 - pretty bad, but from that I could tell that our chance of delivering more than a given amount of points per person per sprint was(assuming a normal distribution): 85% for 3 points. 60% for 5 points. 17% for 8 points. 4% for 10 points. Conclusion: per sprint we should either take one 5 point task or two 3 point tasks, but avoid 5 + 3 and never take on a 5 + 5. Also take a 3 if we didn't deliver the previous sprint. Last point: some outliers were estimated somewhat highly (5), but took much less. One feature they had in common was the word "analysis" in the ticket title. I guess the lesson here would be to ask: are we really planning on taking a whole sprint(two weeks) to analyse something?