What is Planning Poker?

In Agile software development, accurate estimation of work items is crucial for effective planning and successful completion of projects. Planning Poker is a collaborative technique that leverages the wisdom of the team to estimate amount of effort, complexity, or relative size of user stories or work items. Here, we will dive into the details of Planning Poker, its advantages, and how it can bring effectiveness to your estimation process. 

Planning Poker, is a conversation-based, consensus-driven estimation technique used in Agile development. It brings together a team of cross-functional individuals with different skill sets to collectively assign story points to user stories, features, or other work items. This process includes sharing, conversation, to bring alignment among team members. This helps with estimation accuracy.

How Planning Poker Works

i. Team Session: Planning poker is usually part of backlog refinement sessions where the entire Agile team participates. This includes Scrum Master, Product Owner and Developers (coders, testers, designers, architects and whoever is part of the cross functional team). Every developer is handed a deck of poker cards for estimating as a team. The poker deck traditionally has values in fibonacci sequence: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, …. Some decks also include a 1/2, ?. Coffee etc. Some popular deviations include: 1,2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40 and 100 values. Using a consistent value series is recommended. 

ii. Stories Presentation: Work Items, usually user stories are already pre-refined* by this time. They are arranged in the order of priority from the top moving down the backlog. The Product Owner (or occasionally an SME of the selected story(in order of priority)) is asked** to present the story to the team explaining its purpose, requirements(need, value, risks, outcomes etc.). PO/SME also brings up the acceptance criteria to help the team understand the effort involved prior to team estimation. The team asks questions/clarifications about the work details including the acceptance criteria.  

*Pre-refinement is an activity that allows PO and any SMEs in the team to come together as needed to make sure the top stories are appropriately defined, prioritized, and has initial acceptance criteria in place. This helps ensure that the team backlog refinement sessions are smooth and productive. Please get in touch to understand how to implement these sessions into your Sprints to make team work effective.

**Scrum Master ideally facilitates the backlog refinement sessions.

iii. Individual Selection: Once the development team has enough understanding of the user story or work item in play, the Scrum Master asks them to privately select the estimate by pulling the card and keeping it to themselves (or face down). 

iv. Sharing Individual Estimations: Scrum Master then calls the team to reveal their individual estimations on a count of (usually) 3. Everyone in the development team reveals their card at the same time. Scrum Master then picks people with divers or extreme estimates to share their thoughts. He/she may occasionally also pick a random developer to share their thoughts too – to make sure everyone is sharing and is focused. This discussion and open dialogue brings alignment, divergence and convergence to a team estimate that everyone is comfortable with. 

v.  Iterating Over Estimation: Some stories call for an extra round or two of estimation where the Scrum Master may ask the team to re-estimate the same story to see if everyone is comfortable with a middle estimate. This is optional and can happen per the need as assessed by the Servant Leader Scrum Master. 
Caution: Too many repeat estimates over a single story may be harmful and wasteful

vi. Moving to Next Story: Once a story has agreed upon team estimates, the Scrum Master updates the estimate for the story on the index card or the digital tool and the same process is repeated for the next high priority story and so on till the timeboxed session is over or enough stories have been estimated. 

 

Best Practices for Agile Planning Poker

i. Estimate with Consistency: We recommend using story point units and fibonacci or modified fibonacci sequence as shared in the previous section. Some teams like to estimate using T-shirt sizing or ideal days. T-shirt sizing estimation benefits when some relationship is established between different T-shirt sizes (eg. L = 3 * S, M = 1.5 * S, etc.). Ideal days can cause confusion if not defined and used clearly (see article: What does Velocity represent in Scrum? | Agilonomics ) . 
Whatever you use, be consistent.

Our prior recommendations on PO driven pre-refinement and consistent team backlog refinement sessions will make this entire process smooth. 

ii. Use Triangulation for Comparing with other Stories: Triangulation is a method where an Agile team visually compares how a story effort shows up relatively w.r.t. other stories estimated by the same team. The team puts a newly estimated story on a white board or a digital board (such as miro) alongside a (few) other stories to see how they compare. Each story is in a bin (1, 2, 3, 5, ….). This helps with conversations that sometimes result in slight adjustments. See figure below:

As you go ahead with your consistent estimations, a question that will often come up is, “How do story points relate to hours”. Reviewing this post will help you: 
(65) How many hours does a Story Point equal to? | LinkedIn

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