Agile Estimation Practices - Demystifying Story Points

Story Points is one of the more difficult concepts to understand in an Agile project as it moves away from
• well-established estimation mechanisms which are structured and rule based to a more ad-hoc and relative way of estimation
• data that can be used to compare projects ( with certain similarities) across the industry to a mechanism which is useful only across the same project
• Allows experts to do estimations to a way where the entire team is involved in estimating.
Also story points are used for determining velocity of a team which is an important metric. I found that the book I read on this topic sometimes missed addressing this from ground up and hence I have made an attempt to fill this void. I hope the readers find this useful and this makes them more knowledgeable on this topic.