Planning poker

Planning poker combines multiple expert opinions for estimating. Stories like [Story Points] are prepared for estimation. Each story is discussed. Afterwards each participant chooses from a deck a numbered card that represents his estimate of how much work is involved for a story. When all participants have chosen their estimates, they are revealed and discussed. Planning poker is suitable for initial estimations when the requirements are fixed.

How To

Participants in planning poker include all of the developers on the team. Since Planning Poker is suitable for small to medium-sized projects, the size of the team will typically not exceed ten people.Each estimator gets a deck of cards, for example the cards 0, 1, 2,3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40 and 100. The moderate opens the discussion by presenting the first user story. The moderator shall be familiar with the project domain since he/she will have to answer any questions. After the discussion each participant selects a card from the deck that represents his/her estimate. When each estimator has selected a card, the cards are simultaneously presented. Each estimation may differ significantly. The participants that gave the highest and lowest estimate explain their selection. The participants discuss the estimations. After the discussion each estimator re-estimates by selecting a card. The activity is repeated until all estimations are nearly the same.

It often happens that the discussion takes too long and goes into the wrong direction. To prevent this it could be helpful to define a timelimit, for example 3 minutes, for discussion of the estimates of each story or only take a subset of the team by splitting the team into two or three smaller teams.