Story Points & Estimation

Correct Answer: Let the story retain its original estimation to maintain consistency in the project's velocity.

In Scrum, once points have been assigned to a story during a planning poker session, they should not be altered even if the team realizes a story is less complex than initially thought. This practice maintains consistency in the project's velocity, which is a key metric in Scrum for predicting the amount of work that can be done in future sprints. Changing the estimate midway could distort this important metric and, hence, the predictability of the team's future performance. The idea behind this is to learn from such estimations and improve in the future. The answer stating to re-estimate the story to 8 points immediately disregards this principle. The option suggesting excluding the story from the sprint completely is not aligned with Scrum principles as work committed to a sprint should generally not be removed. The answer suggesting to ask the Product Owner to lower the story's importance due to the miscalculation is incorrect as the importance of a story is usually related to its business value, not its complexity.

Correct Answer: Encourage the team to reflect on their estimation process and find ways to improve and align their understanding of story points.

Discovering that story point estimations are increasing every sprint during a sprint retrospective is a clear indication that the team's understanding or application of story points might be inconsistent or inefficiently implemented. Therefore, the ScrumMaster should encourage the team to critically reflect on their estimation process, to identify possible areas requiring improvement, and align their understanding of story points. This suggestion is more in line with Agile principles of self-reflection, continuous improvement and team autonomy. Other options are not advisable as they either try to manipulate the real situation (like changing the definition of a story point, which may only mask the underlying problem), dictate a certain way of operation (like disallowing assigning high story points to any story in the future, which undermines the team's ability to estimate complexity based on their experience and knowledge), or encourage an unhealthy work culture (like advising the team to work overtime to meet the higher estimate, which may lead to burnout and reduce overall team productivity and morale).

Correct Answer: Encourage the Product Owner to rewrite or revisit the user story until it's clear enough to be estimated.

In Scrum, clarity on user stories is paramount and it is the Product Owner's responsibility to articulate user stories in a way the team can estimate. In this situation, the ScrumMaster should facilitate the Product Owner in revisiting the user story to make it clear, rather than guessing or self-estimating the story points. The notion of removing the story entirely is also not a best practice as it might be possible that the story is unclear rather than irrelevant. So the best course of action is to encourage the Product Owner to rewrite or revisit the user story until it's clear enough to be estimated, hence making the first answer the optimal one.