Planning Poker® in Scrum brings together multiple expert opinions for the agile estimation of a project. In this type of agile planning, we include everyone from programmers, testers and database engineers to analysts, user interaction designers and more. Because these team members represent all disciplines on a software project, they’re better suited to the estimation task than anyone else.

To get started with Planning Poker with your team, you can purchase Planning Poker cards from Mountain Goat Software. Or, play Planning Poker online for free.

Planning Poker combines expert opinion, analogy, and disaggregation into an enjoyable approach to estimating that results in quick but reliable estimates. The values represent the number of story points, ideal days, or other units in which the team estimates. The estimators discuss the feature, asking questions of the product owner as needed. When the feature has been fully discussed, each. Tips for Planning Poker in Scrum. Here’s some tips for common challenges in Planning Poker: Keep discussions productive: Consider purchasing a two-minute sand timer, and allowing anyone in the meeting to start it at any time. When the sand runs out, the next round of Planning Poker cards is played.

How Does Planning Poker Work?

At the start of this agile planning exercise, each estimator is given a deck of Planning Poker cards. Each card has one of the valid estimates on it, for example: 0, 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100 and infinity.

For each user story or theme to be estimated, a moderator (usually the product owner or an analyst) reads the description. There will be some discussion, where the product owner answers any questions the estimators have. But the goal of Planning Poker in Scrum is not to derive an estimate that will withstand all future scrutiny. Instead, we want a valuable estimate that can be arrived at inexpensively.

Poker Planning App Download

After discussion, each estimator privately selects a Planning Poker card representing his or her agile estimation. Once each estimator has made a selection, cards are simultaneously turned over and shown so that all participants can see one another’s estimate.

Estimates will likely differ significantly. And that’s OK. The highest and lowest estimators explain their perspective so that the team can know where they’re coming from. The moderator takes notes during this agile planning session that will be helpful when the story is programmed and tested.

After discussion, each estimator re-estimates by selecting a card. Often, the estimates will converge by the second round. If not, repeat the process until the team agrees on a single estimate to use for the story or these. It rarely takes more than three rounds in agile estimation to reach the goal.

Tips for Planning Poker in Scrum

Here’s some tips for common challenges in Planning Poker:

• Keep discussions productive: Consider purchasing a two-minute sand timer, and allowing anyone in the meeting to start it at any time. When the sand runs out, the next round of Planning Poker cards is played. This helps teams learn to estimate more rapidly within agile planning.
• Break out into smaller sessions: It is possible to play Planning Poker with a subset of the team. It’s not ideal, but a good option if there are many stories to be estimated, as can often happen at the start of a new project.
• Choose the right time to play: Estimating teams will need to play Planning Poker at two different occasions. The first time, teams will usually estimate a large number of items before the project kicks off or during first iterations. The second time, teams need to put forth ongoing effort to estimate new stories identified during an iteration.

You can learn more about Planning Poker in detail in the Mountain Goat Software store or in Mike Cohn’s book, Agile Estimating and Planning.

At Red River Software we’re into SCRUM. As part of this framework, we like to use a simple form of Planning Poker. I won’t be discussing the benefits of this approach here, but essentially we (the devs) try to quantify how complex a new application feature will be to implement.

Poker Planning App Store

We had a bunch of poker cards printed up to use during planning meetings, and it proved quite effective and popular. However, it was only a matter of time before we all did what geeks do; we pushed the cards aside in favour of an app on our phone. Not really a problem, but when we have a customer sitting in on planning meetings, it’s nice to shove your branded poker cards in their face.

In addition to blatant product placement, we had another issue… what if you can’t get everyone round the table?

To give you some background; Red River has been working on a project for a number of years, and more recently there have been some changes within the development team. Specifically the development team has doubled, and now operates from different countries. This makes it difficult to do our planning poker as we can’t see each other. Simple solution you say? Use web cams or a chat room? Well if you’ve ever been in a video conference with more than 3 people, you’ll know it can be painful. We barely get 8-10 people on a GoToMeeting using voice properly. I digress.

To quote one of the many SCRUM commandments:-

“As a SCRUM master, I want my team to be able offer estimates simultaneously, in order to fairly determine the story point value for a story.”

So we needed a simple solution for playing our planning poker games within a distributed team. As a bonus, we also wanted it to be mobile friendly so we didn’t all need laptops during the planning meeting. We’ve all got smartphones right?

Poker Planning App Games

So some key application features:

1. Accessible
2. No-installers
3. Simple to use
4. Spectator mode
5. Chat

I could have made that list even simpler, but I wanted to try some new things out. The technologies of choice are NodeJS and plain old HTML.

I invite you to watch this space as we develop it further.

Poker Planning App Builder

While you wait, you can use this excellently simple app for your planning sessions…
Scrum Poker cards for Android and iPhone.