Planning poker is an effective way for your Agile development team to reach a consensus on story points. This allows each member of the team to individually contribute their thoughts and ideas towards each user story, which ultimately helps to synchronize the efforts of your team members, and adds more transparency to your sprint planning
WHAT IS PLANNING POKER?
Planning poker is a group estimation technique intended to provide more accurate estimates than an individual working alone could come up with by guessing or using historical data as a substitute for current knowledge about a given task. This is done by soliciting input from everyone in the room and limiting their inputs to the fibonacci sequence rather than single values. This makes the process more transparent and forces participants to consider the range of difficulty involved with tasks. Planning poker also encourages collaboration among the development team, and provides a space for open discussion about each and every user story that is pulled into your team's sprint.
HOW TO PLAY PLANNING POKER
Planning poker is a simple and lightweight technique for estimating the effort involved in completing a piece of work. A typical planning poker session will involve a number of team members sitting around a table. The product owner will be present, as well as one or two other people who are familiar with the item under discussion. The remaining participants (and the main ones playing the game) are those who will do the work involved - the development team.
All that's need to play planning poker is a deck of cards. Often times, the cards are limited to the fibonacci sequence - 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc.
To play, the Scrum Master will pull up a story from the backlog that's under consideration for the sprint. The team will spend some time reviewing the Acceptance Criteria. Then, everyone will select a card based on the level of difficulty and display them at the same time. If all of the cards are the same value, then the team agrees on the level of effort and that point value is assigned to the story., If there is a discrepancy among the team, then a discussion is required until the team is in agreement on a story point estimate.
This whole process is repeated until the sprint backlog is at capacity.
TAKEAWAY
Planning poker is a simple and effective technique for estimating user stories. It was invented by James Grenning in 2003 and has been used in agile development since 2004. Planning poker is usually the first task performed during an agile planning meeting, such as sprint planning.
CONCLUSION
Now that you understand how a planning poker session works, you can plan for them in your organization’s Agile development sessions. As you continue to practice planning poker with your team members, keep in mind the following tips: Keep it casual; don’t let the entire process become stale. Take a break now and then, or change up the routine. The idea is to get everyone on your team contributing ideas and reaching a consensus on story points by using concrete data points to accurately forecast each story's size.
