Your Role as Scrum Master during Planning Poker
Planning Poker is a consensus-based technique used during sprint planning meetings to estimate how long it will take to complete user stories or tasks.
During agile sprint planning meetings, your team will estimate how many story points to assign to each user story. This is done using a consensus-based technique called planning poker. Planning poker is a valuable tool during this step because it reduces the influence of one person's opinion over another.
Remember: when you are acting as Scrum Master, your role is to facilitate the meeting and ensure that all voices are heard, not to drive toward a particular outcome. Strive to be neutral and encourage other team members to share their opinions before you share yours.
As the facilitator of this activity, you'll want to ensure that everyone understands the story being discussed, and has had a chance to put their cards face down at the beginning.
Your role as the scrum master is to keep the team engaged and focused. As the facilitator of this activity, you'll want to ensure that everyone understands the story being discussed, and has had a chance to ask any clarifying questions to the Product Owner, Design Team, etc. in order come up with an initial estimate.
- The scrum master creates an environment where people can make their best decisions.
- The scrum master doesn't make the decision; rather, they create an environment so good decisions can be made.
- The scrum master shouldn't provide an estimate for any story, rather leave to the development team.
When playing in person, it's easy enough to use a deck of card to facilitate this activity. However, when playing remote, our Planning Poker tool is a great option for virtual facilitation.
As soon as all participants have placed their cards on the table face down, ask the team members to turn them over at the same time so that all estimates are revealed simultaneously.
- Make sure all participants are present, focused, and ready to actively participate in the planning process.
- Ensure that all items are understood by the entire team before estimates are given. (Remember, you're playing Planning Poker as a team.)
- Make sure that no one dominates discussion, but rather that everyone on the team has a chance to speak regarding their estimate.
After each round, you should examine reasons why one story was estimated higher than another.
You can facilitate this process by asking questions about the team members’ estimations and examining their reasoning. For example:
- Why did you estimate 2? How does it compare to this other story that was also pointed as a 2?
- Why did you estimate 5? Do you think that the story will take about 5 times as lonas the other one?
These kinds of questions will help the team understand each other, giving them a better appreciation of why some stories are estimated higher than others.
