What is planning poker? Definition, Purpose and How To Start

” card and gather information before choosing the right card. It is an estimation technique and a discrete scaling method. It is played using the cards that are represented as modified Fibonacci series. Indeed, XP offers a very concrete set of practices to implement Agile.

• The metaphor helps everyone on the project understand the basic elements of the system and their relationships.
• There’s an important reason for hiding the number values.
• Everyone will get the opportunity to prove their worth and especially in a fun way.
• If only there was a way to skip the headache that comes with backlog prioritization meetings…
• They could be something vague, such as „story points“, or something more concrete, like man-hours.
• It makes an estimate in consensus and not just one person drives the estimate.

If a player shows a higher card, it conveys that the story will be completed with greater difficulty and take a longer period to complete. Keep in mind that it’s common for estimates to vary a lot. Planning poker is an agile development exercise designed to help teams estimate how long various tasks within a development cycle will take. It involves the entire team, bringing a diverse perspective to the exercise. After each person has been given the same number of cards , you’re ready to go through the „story“ for this round.

What are the types of planning poker?

Those with the highest or lowest number give reasons for their choice of number and try to get other estimators to consider their perspective. After a brief discussion, all participants repeat the Agile poker planning technique until a common number is established. As soon as the estimators are done assessing the user story, they reveal their cards at the same time.

Finally, and related to the previous point, this Poker tool makes everyone feel they have contributed something to the plan. People, in general, are more enthusiastic and dedicated to a plan that they helped create instead of simply being told what to do. If team members feel that they have a stake in the project, it becomes important to them, and they work harder to achieve the plan’s objectives. Planning Poker also helps team members anticipate how many people they will need to work on a given task. This way, you will avoid the extremes of not having enough people or assigning too many people, resulting in a duplication of effort.

Why does planning poker work?

Scrum Team Members- derive the information from the product backlog. It is recommended not to use this technique if the tasks are way beyond complex and are out of the team’s scope. This process is unsuitable if you do not have enough people to handle the issues and tasks. This method was popularized by Barry Boehm, who emphasizes group iteration to reach a conclusion with proper Effort and time taken. Then estimate the Effort and time taken to complete each task.

Then you need some references and they can be obtained from the previous works. Now the estimators will individually select the card based on the discussion to represent their estimation. After the selection is completed by all individuals, everyone will simultaneously turn the card to reveal their estimate to all participants. This backlog keeps on increasing after the user adds some requirements. In that case, teams have to work parallely in calculating the estimation once per iteration.

User Story Discussion

The story is read aloud and visually shared with the team. If no stories have been estimated, your estimate cannot be compared to anything, so we need to baseline. Aashiya has worked as a freelancer for multiple online https://www.globalcloudteam.com/glossary/planning-poker/ platforms and clients across the globe. She has almost 4 years of experience in content creation and is known to deliver quality content. She is versed in SEO and relies heavily on her research capabilities.

If the estimators choose the same number then a consensus is reached and they can move on to the next story point. For example, teams can use ScrumPoker – a Microsoft Teams add-on that enables them to work faster and get more effective estimations of stories. The goal of planning poker is to arrive at a shared understanding of the complexity of a task, and alignment on the level of effort required to complete it. Conventional wisdom tells us that the best way to handle an overwhelming task is to split it up into sub-tasks and focus on one at a time. You repeat the process with each task until you run out of them.

Planning Poker: more than a game of chance

Planning Poker® is a consensus-based technique for agile estimating. It is a fun and engaging way for teams to apply relative estimates to planned work. A planning poker session is usually around 30 minutes, and is lead by a SCRUM master or https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ team-lead. The game allows each member to contribute to project planning and encourages lively discussions. The product owner or the analyst who plays the role of a moderator is the key player in the planning poker estimation technique.

Regardless of how you’ve decided to value your planning poker cards, the higher values should represent that the task is more difficult or will take longer to finish. The Poker tool session begins with the customer or product owner reading an Agile-based user story or describing a desired feature to the team. Each estimator has their deck of Planning Poker cards, with the values representing either a story point number, ideal days, or whatever other unit the members mutually agreed upon.

User Story Description

Chpokify.com- an easy, efficient, and ideal planning tool. If the discussions are not enough to get everyone on the same page, then this technique will fail to show its results. Create WBS by breaking the entire project into smaller tasks. Planning Poker was also recognized by names such as pointing poker, Scrum Poker, and Estimation Poker. This game has closed the gap between members and brought them closer so they can share their perspectives. Undoubtedly, it has improved the rate of delivering projects with fewer bugs.

Planning Poker was introduced to involve the remaining ones and their views about the estimate. This way, the complete team members know what is going on, the user’s requirements, the resources available, and other details. Planning Poker technique not only removes the boredom but also reduces the time taken to decide on an estimate. Optimize the process of determining the value that each item brings to the business against the estimated cost of its development, according to the Return on Investment .

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While this is certainly the most valuable benefit, there are other collateral benefits as well. This consensus-based estimation is the basis of the Agile planning poker method. But if the cards differ, then the group continues its discussion about the story. Those with higher estimates than the rest of the group will explain their reasoning and try to persuade their coworkers to see their position.