Agile in a Flash 24

A Winning Hand for Playing Poker – The Plan

Agile in a Flash by Jeff Langr and Tim Ottinger (card #24)

1. Agree on a short size scale

2. Team briefly discusses a story

3. Everyone silently selects a point card

4. Team reveals all cards in unison

5. If outliers exist, discuss and re-vote

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James Grenning’s Planning Poker is a fun, consensus-based technique to expedite your story estimation sessions. It requires a short scale of story sizes, such as 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, or XS, S, M, L, XL. The units are not days or hours but purely relative sizes: 1 being tiny, 2 being twice as large. The larger gap between higherpoint values reflects the reality of diminished accuracy for larger estimates. Stories

larger than the scale must be broken into smaller stories.

Each Planning Poker participant brings an estimation deck (perhaps hand-drawn) containing one card for each value in the scale. The customer and team discuss and design a story until all understand and agree on its meaning. Each team member who will help build the story then secretly selects a card representing

their estimate of the story size. All cards are revealed simultaneously. The private selection and reveal prevent otherwise overly influential folks from dominating the estimates!

If everyone agrees precisely, move on. If not, discuss the outliers to find out the rationale behind lower or higher estimates. Timebox the discussions. If you can’t agree upon a final estimate because of insufficient information, have a quick follow-up estimation session after any needed investigation. Otherwise, quickly select the more conservative estimate. Cheers! Move on.