The Points Panel
Summary: 
A way of estimating (loosely) the relative size and complexity of a task by tagging the task with 'points'. You can later refine these estimates, and over time develop a 'good sense' of how long tasks will take.
Tip: Points are a Professional Feature, for people, teams, departments, and organizations who must estimate their work.
Why Would I Use Points?
Some organizations ( many organizations ), or at least some set of people within them, have to estimate work that they have not done before, or that could vary a lot in the time and money it takes to complete the work. The purpose of using points is to guess the estimated 'size' of the work, if it's big, then break it into pieces, do the work, look at how long it actually took, and to slowly build a database of 'guesses versus actuals': for the organization, for the team, and for the individual. Then when a new task, problems, job or project arrives, you can look at the past tasks, problems, jobs, or projects and choose those that are about the same 'size'. And use the 'guesses versus actual' number to improve your estimates. And for larger projects, you can learn everyone's 'velocity'. What that means, is how many points of work the team, and individuals on the team, can produce in a time period. The idea is to increase the accuracy of estimating so that you create trust and certainty. It is not to make people work faster. (That doesn't happen other than by accumulated experience - there is no magic bullet.) In general, the purpose of the agile methods is to create empirical evidence that builds predictability and trust between staff and customer, whether the customer is internal or external to the organization. There is a very elaborate 'science' to this process of estimating. And it works extremely well. Because it uses empirical measurements to do two things: control management's wishful thinking, and control staff's inescapable cognitive biases. We evolved to be rather optimistic when working in groups, in order to bias us toward cooperation. But the 'incentive' produced by that cognitive bias, tends to obscure reality from us. The universe is not all that friendly to mankind. And without cognitive biases, we might be overwhelmed by it. Runcible, and estimating, help us get beyond those biases.
Note: We have a wonderful set of more advanced estimating features in the queue - including triangulation and 'poker' but like many things we could not complete them for the beta program. It's a big feature set and it will take the hobbits some time.
What Actions Can I Take?
Select Select one or more Points to filter the Tasks Panel.
Task Drop Drop one or more tasks onto a Point to tag it.
Advanced
Set Story Point's Time Equivalent For example, if you notice that your project's actual work tends to be 1.5 times your story point estimates, you can change your Program's Story Point Time Equivalent to 1.5. And all time estimates going forward will be calculated by using 1.5 times the number of story points. We have found that adjusting this value during a project can help the team produce better time estimates from their 'scale' estimates. To set the multiplier:
Open the Program's Profile Page Select "Edit" Scroll down to Story Point Time Equivalent Change the value. Press Save. The setting is now changed.
Note: This setting affects all projects, deliverables and tasks in the program from the point at which you change it onward. It does not affect previously calculated values. Tidbit: When building Runcible we consistently performed at 4x our point estimates. It's not uncommon to perform at 2-2.5x. Smaller groups will have larger variations, and larger groups less. The more complex the more variation, the lower the complexity the less variation.
What Filters Can I Use?
None.