A user story is a particular business need assigned to the software development team. Using estimations of story points rather than time allows development teams to be less precise where a story point is a metric used to estimate the difficulty of implementing a given story.

Story Points Allocation provides a vehicle for recording story points that have been allocated for each user story,

It may be difficult, for example, to estimate how long a particular feature will take to develop but relatively easy to understand if it is more complex than others, in which case it should be assigned more story points.

Elements considered in assigning a story point include the complexity of the story, the number of unknown factors and the potential effort required to implement it. Story points are usually expressed according to a numerical range, such as an adaptation of a Fibonacci sequence, or in accordance with a mathematical series, or hours or days approximation (See Planning Poker Companion for examples).

Scroll down to the Agile Story Points Allocation example below.