For an agile software organization, stakeholders can include a product owner, developers, UX designers, QA testers, and product managers, among others. For Agile teams, planning poker is a great addition to the product planning and development process. It encourages team collaboration and ensures both realistic and accurate timelines as it is a consensus-based process.

But how does a team agree on the number of points to give a user story? Over a period of several sprints, the team establishes an average velocity which can then be used as a rough calculation for delivery dates and time estimates. Like it or not, in technology, delivery dates and time estimates are a day-to-day reality for the vast majority of teams.

What is Planning Poker in Agile?

Incorporating planning poker into your workflow is fun and simple and helps make the important task of prioritizing your backlog easier and more engaging. One of these benefits is the ability to play planning poker remotely, which is great for hybrid work teams. And since it’s completely digital, you’ll get richer insights and faster play times, making the entire process more productive. In planning poker, each member of the team is given a number of cards.

Each person should lay down their estimation face down from their deck. Once everyone has done this, the entire team flips their cards face up in unison. You then move from one person to the next as the reasoning behind each estimation is shared. The score is averaged out to determine how long that task should take. If you would like to become an Agile team leader, Simplilearn can help you take those critical first steps.

What is the purpose of planning poker?

The Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM) gives you a deep understanding of Agile methodologies. It enables you to discover the thumb rules, success metrics, and pitfalls of real-world Agile implementation. While this is certainly the most valuable benefit, there are other collateral benefits as well. Hidden numbers prevent anchoring —  a cognitive bias where the first number sets a pattern for subsequent estimates.
Teams also use Planning Poker as new product backlog items are added. This activity, called product backlog refinement, typically happens about once per iteration. If all estimators all selected the same value, that becomes the estimate. The high and low estimators, especially, should share their reasons. After further discussion, each estimator reselects an estimate card, and all cards are again revealed at the same time. Planning poker in Agile is usually played by several estimators across all departments in product development — from the Scrum master to product managers, developers, QA testers, and UX designers.

Planning Poker helps team members estimate tasks relative to each other. Sometimes, it’s hard, if not impossible, to estimate how long a task will take, especially if you’ve never done it before. So, even if you’ve never had to perform a particular task before, you can look back at past tasks and find a similar one, using it as a benchmark. Now that all of the items in your backlog have estimations, it’s much easier to accurately plan a sprint. Since your entire team has a consensus on how long each task will take, it’s much more likely that you’ll be able to fit the right amount of work into your sprints.

Scrum Project Management: Advantages and Disadvantages

Or you can leverage an Agile technique known as Planning Poker®. The reason for using the Fibonacci sequence instead of simply doubling each subsequent value is because estimating a task as exactly double the effort as another task is misleadingly precise. A task that is about twice as much effort as a 5, has to be evaluated as either a bit less than double (8) or a bit more than double (13).

• When the feature has been fully discussed, each estimator privately selects one card to represent their estimate.
• It enables you to discover the thumb rules, success metrics, and pitfalls of real-world Agile implementation.
• Teams should conduct a Poker tool session soon after creating the initial product backlog.
• If you would like to become an Agile team leader, Simplilearn can help you take those critical first steps.

Planning poker is an estimation method that helps your Agile team project the amount of effort one user story in a product backlog could take to complete. Our tool, Planning Poker®, is a fun, refreshing way to run through a list of user stories and assign effort points to them as a team. Planning poker is a planning and estimation technique used by Agile teams after a product backlog has been created. The setup of this technique helps software teams accurately estimate product development time frames, improve collaboration, and strategize the work to be done. Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimating, mostly used for timeboxing in Agile principles. In planning poker, members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table, instead of speaking them aloud.

After this discussion is complete, everyone reselects their cards. It helps you better understand individual tasks in the product backlog – The collaborative nature of Priority/Planning Poker helps team members better understand the tasks they will be working on. And by ranking the estimated effort of each item, everyone has a better sense of how long working through the backlog will take and what everyone in the team will be working on. It improves future work planning – By regularly using Planning Poker, teams can refine their estimating abilities, leading to more accurate planning for future projects. Planning poker works well with story points by breaking large projects into smaller tasks and defined deadlines.

The process sounds odd, admittedly, and you may be wondering, “Of all the tools you can choose from, why Planning Poker? Once the team has thoroughly discussed everyone’s choices, the estimators repeat the estimation process, reselect a card, and show them simultaneously. The team repeats this process until they reach a consensus, or the group decides they need to table the Agile estimation and planning pending additional information. Planning poker is based on a list of features to be delivered, several copies of a deck of cards, and optionally, an egg timer that can be used to limit time spent in discussion of each item.

Your team can decide the scale of the numbers, but ideally, the numbers should go up in line with the amount of effort a particular task might require. For this reason, some teams choose a scaling sequence of numbers — like the Fibonacci sequence — to ensure there’s a wide enough gap between the lowest and highest priority items. But Priority Poker / Planning Poker isn’t just a more engaging way to make development decisions — its effectiveness has actually been backed up by academic studies. Just grab a deck of index cards from the store and write your desired values on the face of each card. After each person has been given the same number of cards (or poker chips), you’re ready to go through the “story” for this round. Each story represents a task or series of tasks to be completed.
Keep your Agile team on the same page by using a work management tool. Asana helps you plan and organize your Agile projects in a tool that’s flexible https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ and collaborative. Whether your team works in a Kanban board or a more linear timeline, Asana has the features to help your Agile team build quickly.
You just need to click on the game’s name and choose “Start live session.” This will notify all your players that the Product Owner has started a live session and lets them join the game. Owners can also rate items with the option to hide their ratings from players. Next, let your team members have a discussion about this story. This is an opportunity for the various stakeholders in this story to offer up their input. For example, if this will require debugging, have the people who will be completing this task provide their insight.
Over the years, Planning Poker has become a staple in the agile community and is now used by thousands of software development teams worldwide. Just like an online game of poker, you can also play Agile poker online. This is helpful especially for remote teams that don’t have the opportunity to meet in person. The planning poker process remains virtually the same and is a great resource for prioritizing items in the backlog. Planning poker brings together stakeholders from across departments in the organization to reach a consensus on the estimated effort needed for several backlog initiatives.