Story points and velocity in Agile in Software Engineering - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Understanding Story Points and Velocity in Agile

📖 Scenario: You are part of a software development team using Agile methodology. Your team wants to estimate how much work they can complete in each sprint using story points and calculate the velocity to plan future sprints better.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple data structure to represent user stories with their story points, set a sprint goal for total story points, calculate the total story points completed in a sprint, and determine the team's velocity.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary of user stories with exact story point values

Add a variable for the sprint goal in story points

Calculate the total story points completed in the sprint using a loop

Calculate the velocity as the total story points completed divided by the number of sprints

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Agile teams use story points to estimate the effort required for user stories and velocity to measure how much work they can complete in each sprint. This helps in planning and delivering software efficiently.

💼 Career

Understanding story points and velocity is essential for roles like Scrum Master, Product Owner, Agile Coach, and software developers working in Agile environments to manage and track project progress.

1

Create the user stories dictionary

Create a dictionary called user_stories with these exact entries: 'Login Feature': 5, 'Shopping Cart': 8, 'Payment Gateway': 13, 'User Profile': 3, 'Search Function': 5.

Software Engineering

# Create the user_stories dictionary with story points
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with keys as story names and values as story points.

2

Set the sprint goal

Add a variable called sprint_goal and set it to 20 to represent the total story points the team aims to complete in the sprint.

Software Engineering

user_stories = {
    'Login Feature': 5,
    'Shopping Cart': 8,
    'Payment Gateway': 13,
    'User Profile': 3,
    'Search Function': 5
}
# Set the sprint_goal variable to 20
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Assign the number 20 to the variable sprint_goal.

3

Calculate total story points completed

Create a variable called total_completed and set it to 0. Then use a for loop with variables story and points to iterate over user_stories.items(). Inside the loop, add points to total_completed.

Software Engineering

user_stories = {
    'Login Feature': 5,
    'Shopping Cart': 8,
    'Payment Gateway': 13,
    'User Profile': 3,
    'Search Function': 5
}
sprint_goal = 20

# Calculate total_completed story points
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Initialize total_completed to zero before the loop. Use for story, points in user_stories.items(): to loop through the dictionary.

4

Calculate the velocity

Add a variable called number_of_sprints and set it to 1. Then create a variable called velocity and set it to total_completed divided by number_of_sprints.

Software Engineering

user_stories = {
    'Login Feature': 5,
    'Shopping Cart': 8,
    'Payment Gateway': 13,
    'User Profile': 3,
    'Search Function': 5
}
sprint_goal = 20

total_completed = 0
for story, points in user_stories.items():
    total_completed += points

# Set number_of_sprints to 1 and calculate velocity
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Set number_of_sprints to 1. Then calculate velocity by dividing total_completed by number_of_sprints.