• Planning Poker Microsoft Teams
• Planning Poker Meaning

A poker face belies the need for transparency,can be learnt from role models in the parallel economy, and can be used to mask nervous gestures with effective eye contact.

1. Planning Poker An Agile estimation practice which is a variation of the wideband Delphi method of consensus based estimation. It is used to estimate effort or relative size of user stories by assigning story points to each user story.
2. This post continues my recent series about Planning Poker by focusing on when to estimate. Because Planning Poker is a consensus-based estimating approach, it is most appropriate to use it on items that require consensus. That is, I recommend using Planning Poker on product backlog items rather than on the tasks that make up a sprint backlog.

Buy Planning Poker^® decks:

Estimating is one of the supporting activities in Scrum and other agile processes. This means the process of assessing the size of a story, i.e. how long it will take, how much work it is to implement, how expensive it is, or however you want to put it. In Scrum, estimating is a team activity. For each story, the whole team participates in the estimation process. Planning Poker^® (sometimes called Scrum poker) is a simple but powerful tool that makes team-estimating faster, more accurate, and more fun. The term was coined by James Grenning and popularized by Mike Cohn.

Estimating without Planning Poker

Here’s a typical problem with team estimates. Let’s say we are in a sprint planning meeting and the Product Owner says:

So the team starts thinking about how long the story will take (in ideal man-days in this case)….

Mr A believes that he knows exactly what needs to be done, so he thinks this will take 3 days. Mrs B and C are more pessimistic. Mr D and E are slacking off. So Mr A says ”3 days”.

This makes B and C confused. They start doubting their own estimates. Mr E wakes up and doesn’t really know what is being estimated. D is still dozing.The product owner asks for the rest of the team’s estimates.

As you can see, the rest of the team has been heavily influenced by A, just because A spoke up first. This is very risky! Both B and C thought it would take significantly longer than 3 days, their doubts should be aired!

Estimating with Planning Poker

Now imagine that each team member is holding a deck of cards, containing the following cards:

Let’s redo the estimation. The product owner says:

Once again, the team starts thinking about how long the story will take.

This time nobody blurts anything out. Instead they all have to present a card, face down, containing their estimate. Everybody has to present a card, so Mr D and E wake up. Mr D admits that he was sleeping and asks what the story is about. It’s harder to slack off when doing estimates this way :o) When they are done, all cards are turned over simultaneously, revealing everyone’s estimates.

Whoops! Big divergence here. The team, in particular Mr A and Mrs C, need to discuss this story and why their estimates are so wildly different. After some discussion, Mr A realizes that he has forgotten some important tasks that need to be included in the story. Mrs C realizes that, with the design that Mr A presented, the story might be smaller than 20. After the discussion (3 minutes in total) they do another estimation round for that same story.

Convergence! OK, not complete convergence. But they agree that an estimate of 5 should be close enough. Next story.

Why the strange number series?

The higher numbers have less granularity. Why? Why is there no 21 for example? Several reasons:

• Speed up the estimation process by limiting the number of choices (i.e. number of cards).
• Avoid a false sense of accuracy for high estimates.
• Encourage the team to split large stories into smaller ones.

A high estimate (> 20 for example) usually means that the story is not well understood in detail. It would be a waste of time to discuss whether the story is 19, 20, or 22.5. It is simply a big story, and a 20 will reflect that. If you want to get into detail, break the story down into several smaller stories. Smaller stories can be estimated in greater detail.

Special cards

How do I get a hold of Planning Poker decks?

Planning Poker Microsoft Teams

We sell Planning Poker decks online, just press the link below.

The coffee cup card was our addition to the default series :o)

Planning Poker^® is a reg. trademark of Mountain Goat Software, LLC. Sequence of values is (C) Mountain Goat Software, LLC.

Planning Poker Meaning

1. First, the Dealer/Game Organizer will create an account and set up the game with their preferred settings.
2. Next, they’ll add in the User Stories or Tasks that need effort estimation:
3. The Dealer/Game Organizer will send Players a game invite to join:
4. The team can discuss the active story, and everyone chooses a card.
5. When all cards are chosen, the Dealer may choose them to automatically flip over, or they can wait to finish discussions and flip them when the team is ready.
6. After the card flip, Planning Poker® will average the scores of the cards played and round them up to the next card in the Dealer-chosen sequence.
7. You can accept the average and move along to the next story, saving the agreed-upon total, or you edit the score to reflect something else, or reset the round to try effort-pointing again.