Planning Poker

Planning Poker is a technique we assess in the garden.

Summary

Overview: At its most basic, everyone on the team gets a vote. They vote with cards they pull from their hand. Their hand is made up of Story Point cards for each valid set of points in the system being used. Everyone shows their cards. If the cards shown are all similar then the story is updated and folks move on. If the cards are different then debate is done and another vote is had. Continue until everything is scoped.

Detail 1: It is better than having no structure, but it doesn’t scale well. In many cases, much of the debate will center around what a “point” actually means. Older tickets often have to be rescoped as the session moves forward. We are cautious about using this technique.

Detail 2: While not perfect we find that 3 Point Estimation is usually a better solution to estimation.