Planning Poker Definition, Process, Benefits, Tips

It has changed the game entirely by making the estimation straightforward. Many teams have adopted this technique to streamline their estimation process. For implementing Planning Poker within your projects, you should consider enrolling for Agile courses. If your scrum team is struggling to estimate the time and work required to deliver a product or feature in an agile way, why not give planning poker a try? Planning Poker was introduced by James Grenning in 2002 as an estimation technique for agile software development.

Most teams hold a story-writing workshop to write and estimate the initial product backlog. To understand the scope and size of a project, the whole team is encouraged to write user stories and create initial estimates of the work. The https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ whole team includes the developers (team members), Scrum Master, and product owner. Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimating, mostly used for timeboxing in Agile principles.

Step 1: Hand out the cards to participants

Function point specifies the application’s functionality from the user’s point of view. This technique is also used to calculate the estimate of the project. In the testing case, the estimate is based on the user’s requirement or the previous prototype. But in this case, some components need to be calculated, such as. This method was popularized by Barry Boehm, who emphasizes group iteration to reach a conclusion with proper Effort and time taken.

• We might deem this task a 1; if we were to add two lines, we might see it as a 2 because it requires a little bit more work.
• They compare the complexity of the new assignment against past challenges and rank the difficulty as well as the time required.
• The team members can use this understanding to ensure that the frame of reference remains constant.
• Members submit their estimate by turning over a card from their deck.
• Maybe the team member who chose 2 knows that they had already built this function two years ago and it was just a matter of dusting it off and redeploying it.
• Planning Poker leverages the knowledge of the team to estimate work effort.

Agile development teams complete work in sprints, typically 2-3 week periods during which a team works exclusively on an itemized to-do list known as a sprint backlog. Effective estimation is one of the toughest challenges software developers face in their jobs. Regardless of team size, they need to define, estimate, and distribute work throughout a team. As teams get larger, it becomes even more important to build good habits around planning and estimating work. Lack of planning and estimating reduce confidence in a program, breaks down relationships between the team and the business, and makes development harder on everyone.

Otherwise, if they have a card for each number from one to 50, the process would be painfully slow. Simply log in to the tool and preload a set of items to be estimated. They can log in and meet via their favorite video conferencing tool to communicate during the session.

Step 2: Read the story

It is a fun and engaging way for teams to apply relative estimates to planned work. Planning poker brings together stakeholders from across departments in the organization to reach a consensus on the estimated effort needed for several backlog initiatives. For an agile software organization, stakeholders can include a product owner, developers, UX designers, QA testers, and product managers, among others.

In planning poker, members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table, instead of speaking them aloud. By hiding the figures in this way, the group can avoid the cognitive bias of anchoring, where the first number spoken aloud sets a precedent for subsequent estimates. Planning Poker in agile is a very common methodology that lets you estimate the time and effort required to deliver the project. It has helped many teams and organizations to deliver timely projects with fewer bugs. It was released in 2002 and has made its special place in all software companies.

What are the rules of Planning Poker?

When the feature has been fully discussed, each estimator privately selects one card to represent their estimate. The estimators then reveal all of their cards at the same time. Planning Poker® is a consensus-based technique for agile estimating.

Having proper estimation on the table puts much pressure on the team. They not only have to make efforts but also consider several factors to get to the correct estimation. A popular agile technique- Planning Poker was introduced to eliminate this problem.

The other five friends are likely to go along with that first stated choice subconsciously. You can invite unlimited guests into the virtual Planning Poker sessions. A dominating person in the group can unduly influence the other participants. If you’re not careful, it can lead to estimate driven not by consensus but force of will.

Note that estimators who chose especially low or high should explain their choices. But whether you use the physical cards or the online version, this Poker tool is gaining traction in the Agile community. It is a good skill for any Agile or Scrum professional to incorporate into their toolbox. In addition, Planning Poker playing cards are available in the Mountain Goat Software store. Mountain Goat Software’s branded Planning Poker cards are sold at cost as a courtesy to the agile community. Teams estimating with Planning Poker consistently report that they arrive at more accurate estimates than with any technique they’d used before.

In between these extremes, planning poker calls for gradually increasing the numbers according to the perceived effort for that work. By hiding the Poker tool values and showing them simultaneously, the team is more likely to get honest estimates. Team members can say what’s on their minds and offer unbiased opinions, rather than just saying what the customer wants to hear. The moderator (either the product owner or product manager) narrates the story to the group.

Now that all of the items in your backlog have estimations, it’s much easier to accurately plan a sprint. Since your entire team has a consensus on how long each task will take, it’s much more likely that you’ll be able to fit the right amount of work into your sprints. After this discussion is complete, everyone reselects their cards. After the discussion, each person will privately select a card from the deck. Usually, it’s used to show an estimate of story points (but can also be used to represent the number of ideal days).

Each story represents a task or series of tasks to be completed. It’s entirely plausible, for example, that the group might reach a consensus that is wrong. The team members might all be missing some important information that would increase or decrease complexity. If you have imperfect information, planning poker won’t solve this problem for you. Keep your Agile team on the same page by using a work management tool.

Team members then have the opportunity to ask questions and clarify as needed so the entire team can get an accurate sense of what work needs to be completed for that specific backlog item. In 2002, James Grenning created planning poker commonly referred to as “scrum poker”. He believed that the then-popular estimation approach, Wideband Delphi – a method from the 1950s – took too much time, among other limitations. Before anyone gets too excited and starts buying poker chips, we should explain that this isn’t normal Poker, per se. Yes, it involves cards (unless you use the app version), indeed it is a tool used to aid agile teams in estimating and planning.