Planning Poker is a consensus-based technique for estimation, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of development goals in software product development. Planning Poker is done with story points, ideal days, or any other estimating units. The Scrum Master, Product Owner, and the development team participate in Planning Poker activity.

• What Is Planning Poker In Agile?
• Planning Poker: An Agile Estimating And Planning Technique
• Poker Techniques In Agile Methodology
• Planning Poker (Scrum Poker Cards): An Agile Estimation And ...

Purpose: Estimate the effort for User Stories (Product Backlog Items, Value Drivers)

Agile teams from around the world use the planning poker technique to estimate their product backlogs. Scrum Poker can be used with story points, ideal days, or any other estimating unit. Planning Poker in Scrum brings together multiple expert opinions for the agile estimation of a project. See full list on agilealliance.org. Planning poker (also known as Scrum poker) is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of development goals in software development. Nov 13, 2020 The word ‘Poker’ reminds everyone about the Poker card game, and needless to say, this estimation techniques makes the use of cards to provide estimates. We will discuss. We will discuss more about the cards and how a planning poker session is carried on in the subsequent sections of the article. Agile project planning is collaborative and involves the team in the planning and decision making process. For any agile project to be successful, project managers and team members alike must have a thorough understanding of estimation and planning tools and techniques.

Prerequisites: All items have a value estimate. A separate note card is written for each story. Full team membership is known and available for planning, and each team member has a set of planning game cards. The team members are provided with a deck of playing cards. These cards are numbered in Fibonacci sequence (0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, …) or a modified Fibonacci sequence like 0, 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, ?, α. The last 2 symbols denote ‘not sure’ or ‘too complicated to estimate’. The beauty of using the Fibonacci sequence is that the ratio between two successive numbers in the sequence is constant at 1.6 ( 8/5 = 1.6, 34/21 = 1.6, 55/34=1.6 and so on) and so naturally represents an increasing difficulty at estimating the size of a work item as it grows larger and larger.

Agile Planning Poker Rules

The rules for playing Planning Poker activity are as follows.

1. The PO selects a PBI which needs to be estimated and reads that to the team. e.g. The Product Owner picks prioritized items from the backlog.
2. The development team members carry out a discussion on the selected item and ask pertinent questions to the PO. e.g. PO clarifies requirements, assumptions and risks
3. Each team member secretly picks up one card to represent his/her estimate.
4. Once all the estimations are done, these are exposed to all the team members.
5. If everyone selects the same card, they do consensus, and that number becomes the PBI estimate.
6. If the estimates are not equal, the estimators have a discussion to come to a common justification. Or else, the high-low story points estimators are asked to explain their estimates.
7. After the discussion, they go back to step 4 and repeat till the consensus is reached.
8. After playing 2 or 3 rounds, the estimates are expected to converge or be within an acceptable range. If it does not, then the moderator could go with the majority, mean or a weighted average of the estimates.
9. The Scrum Master acts as the moderator and chairs the meeting. Coaches and helps the team in carrying out the activity in a better way. e.g. SM continually searches for individuals who, by their body language or by their quietness, appear to disagree and helps them engage better.

Key points of Agile Planning Poker

• It is extremely important that the voting for an item continues until all team members unanimously vote the same way (this way team members and outside stakeholders cannot blame any individual for “wrong” estimates)
• In Scrum, it is normal for the Product Owner to be present during this process, but not to participate in the voting
• Voting should not include extensive discussion – instead, the emphasis is on multiple rapid voting cycles
• If more than one person has the lowest or highest vote, usually just one person shares their reason in order to help the process move quickly.
• The first few items will often take 10 or 15 rounds of voting before the team arrives at a unanimous vote.
• Later on, items may take just one or two rounds of voting to arrive at a unanimous decision
• Some teams, where trust levels are high, will discard with the use of physical cards and just briefly discuss votes

Benefits of Agile Planning Poker

• Fosters collaboration by engaging entire team.
• Creates consensus estimate rather than having a single person driving the estimate.
• Exposes issues early through discussion of each user story.

Planning poker combines three methods of estimation −

Expert Opinion − In expert opinion-based estimation approach, an expert is asked how long something will take or how big it will be. The expert provides an estimate relying on his or her experience or intuition or gut feel. Expert Opinion Estimation usually doesn’t take much time and is more accurate compared to some of the analytical methods.

Analogy − Analogy estimation uses comparison of user stories. The user story under estimation is compared with similar user stories implemented earlier, giving accurate results as the estimation is based on proven data.

Disaggregation − Disaggregation estimation is done by splitting a user story into smaller, easier-to-estimate user stories. The user stories to be included in a sprint are normally in the range of two to five days to develop. Hence, the user stories that possibly take longer duration need to be split into smaller use-Cases. This approach also ensures that there would be many stories that are comparable.

What Is Planning Poker In Agile?

When should we engage in Planning Poker?

Most teams will hold a Planning Poker session shortly after an initial product backlog is written. This session (which may be spread over multiple days) is used to create initial estimates useful in scoping or sizing the project.

Because product backlog items (usually in the form of user stories) will continue to be added throughout the project, most teams will find it helpful to conduct subsequent agile estimating and planning sessions once per iteration. Usually, this is done a few days before the end of the iteration and immediately following a daily standup, since the whole team is together at that time anyway.

How does poker planning work with a distributed team?

PlanningPoker.com. Mountain Goat Software helped develop that website to offer it as a free resource to the agile community. A product owner, ScrumMaster or agile coach can log in and preload a set of items to be estimated. A private URL can then be shared with estimators who log in and join a conference call or Skype session. Agile estimating and planning then proceeds as it would in person.

Tips for Agile Planning Poker in Scrum

• 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.

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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.

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The Accuracy of Group vs. Individual Estimation

According to some study on the accuracy of estimation of effort between individual and group in an experiment for a software project. 20 software professionals from the same company individually estimated the work effort required to implement the same software development project. The participants had different background and roles and the software project had previously been implemented. After that, they formed five groups. Each group agreed on one estimation by discussing and combining of the knowledge among them.

Result – The estimates based on group discussions were more accurate than the individual estimates.

What is Planning Poker?

Planning poker (also known as Scrum poker) is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of development goals in software development.

Steps for Planning Poker

1. To start a poker planning session, the product owner or customer reads an agile user story or describes a feature to the estimators.
   For example:
   “Customer logs in to the reservation system”
   “Customer enters search criteria for a hotel reservation”
2. Team members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table without revealing their estimate (Fibonacci values: 1,2,3,5,8,13,20,40)
3. Cards are simultaneously displayed
4. The estimates are then discussed and high and low estimates are explained
5. Repeat as needed until estimates converge

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.

Agile Estimation – Relative vs Absolute

An estimate is nothing more than a well educated guess. We use all the knowledge and experience at hand to make a guess about the amount of time it is going to take. So instead of looking at every new work item separately, why not compare it to previously finished work items? It’s easier for humans to relate to similar items than to guess the actual size of things anyway.

For example, is it closer to this really small thing? Or is it more like this normal sized item? Or is it really huge like that one piece of work we finished last month? Doing relative estimates will not only reduce the amount of time spent on estimating work, it will also heavily increase the accuracy of the estimates.

Our brain is not capable of doing absolute estimates; we always put that new thing that we need to estimate in relationship to things we already know.

Fibonacci sequence and Planning Poker

Planning Poker uses of the Fibonacci sequence to assign a point value to a feature or user story. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical series of numbers that was introduced in the 13th century and used to explain certain formative aspects of nature, such as the branching of trees. The series is generated by adding the two previous numbers together to get the next value in the sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on.

For agile estimation purposes, some of the numbers have been changed, resulting in the following series: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100 as shown in the Figure below:

The Interpretation of the point assigned to a poker card is listed in the table below:

Point vs Hour Value in Estimation

Planning Poker: An Agile Estimating And Planning Technique

So why use story points instead of time values? Story pointing allows the team to focus on the complexity and time involved in delivering a piece of work. The team compares the new work against work they’ve already done. They compare the complexity of the new assignment against past challenges and rank the difficulty as well as the time required.

Poker Techniques In Agile Methodology

For example, we don’t often account for “the cost of doing business.” Meetings, email, code reviews, etc. with time values. But in reality, all these are necessary practices throughout in our daily life, but don’t actually count as “work.” Story points isolate the software development work from the associated logistic work items, so estimates using point based should more consistent than hour base approach.

Planning Poker (Scrum Poker Cards): An Agile Estimation And ...