How to handle points on story being removed from a sprint
One of our teams has a story that was sized (in story points) and accepted into the sprint.
It was discovered that during the sprint that this item was not needed anymore and the item will be closed/removed.
Question is what do we do with the points on the story?
The PO is asking if we should rescore the story to actual effort or zero out the points.
In my opinion since the item had spurred some conversations in the team and some minor research was performed, the points should not be zeroed out. Estimating stories for predicting velocity should self correct over time.
The purpose of estimation is to help a team figure out how much work it can complete in a Sprint.
Since the story was not completed, why would it have any bearing on such a projection at all?
Story points are a planning metric to guide the Development Team and the Product Owner in identifying an acceptable amount of work to forecast each sprint.
Once the sprint starts, story points are meaningless. The Development Team has its list of items in the Sprint Backlog to work from. If an item is moved out of the sprint for any reason, it is placed back in the Product Backlog and remaining work is re-estimated for future sprint evaluation.
In my opinion, if the de-scoped item is no longer needed, then close it, and don't waste time updating the story point value.