By ThaddeusRavenscroft February 2, 2024 - 4:20pm

Ever heard of Planning Poker? Well, let me tell you, it's not only a game but also a super cool exercise that's all about team consensus. A brainstorming session that's secretly a party in disguise!

So, here's the deal: Planning Poker helps us figure out just how much elbow grease we're gonna need to knock out a chunk of work. And guess what? We base our guesses on what the customer tells us, usually through these things called user stories https://mybetinfo.com/.

James Grenning was the guy who came up with the term Planning Poker back in 2002. Then Mike Cohn took it to the next level in his book ""Agile Estimating and Planning."" It's like they gave us the ultimate hack for project estimates, and I'm totally here for it.

Breaking it down - in Planning Poker, each team member gets a deck of cards with numbers from a specific sequence on them.

Then, we take a user story and everyone throws a card face down on the table. That card's got a number on it that represents what each person thinks is a fair amount of points to finish that story.

Now, if everyone's cards are way off from each other, the people with the highest and lowest bets have to spill the beans on their thought process. And then, based on those heart-to-hearts, we throw our cards cbc down again until we hit that sweet spot of agreement and lock down an estimate.

Why Fibonacci Rocks for Planning Poker

Earlier on, I mentioned these card sequences, right? They can be simple numbers (0, 1, 2, you get the gist) or they can follow this thing called the Fibonacci sequence. Wikipedia tells us it's a series of numbers where each one is the sum of the two before it. Here's a cool image to give you the vibe of the Fibonacci sequence.

So, why do we love Fibonacci for Planning Poker? Because the bigger the task, the hazier the estimate gets, and Fibonacci gets that. Down below, you'll see a deck of cards following this sequence. And sure, the internet's got a bunch of different decks you can use, but I'm tossing you my favorite example to get you started.

Unpacking the Planning Poker Deck

You might be scratching your head over some oddball elements in the deck, like what's up with the ?, 0, 0.5, [...], and a coffee cup, right? Let me clear that up for you bbc.

The other symbols are just the team's way of saying, ""Yeah, we're not sure how hard this will be."" But don't sweat it, Planning Poker is super straightforward and a blast to play. No way someone's walking away confused.

Putting Planning Poker Into Play

Alright, let's set the scene. You're at your sprint planning meeting, surrounded by your four teammates, the ScrumMaster, and the Product Owner. Picture that? Awesome! You can whip out Planning Poker when you're sorting tasks by priority or when you're trying to guess how much effort they'll take. I'm gonna walk you through an effort estimation because the game's the same either way.

Imagine you've already used Planning Poker to rank the tasks, so you know which ones to tackle first. Now it's time to guess the effort to develop 'em. Everyone except the ScrumMaster and P.O. gets a deck with numbers and those quirky symbols we talked about. The ScrumMaster asks the Product Owner to read the first user story—something like, ""As a user, I wanna hop onto the website from my phone and have it work just like on my desktop browser."" Everyone takes a moment to consider the story, then boom, cards hit the table.

[table caption=""1st Round"" width=""300"" colwidth=""150|150"" colalign=""center|center"" align=""center""]Member, Poker CardLucas,8Ana,5Alan,21Carlos,3Maria, 5[/table]

Clearly, Alan and Carlos threw out some wild guesses. The ScrumMaster's like, ""Alright, spill it. Why those numbers?"" And they're like:

We'd need to build an entire mobile site, fresh HTML, CSS, JS, and mesh it with what we've got. Big design and coding efforts are in store to make this puppy mobile-friendly. Plus, we gotta think about all the plugins we're using and hunt for mobile equivalents.

But actually, we could just tweak our current setup, a little CSS and HTML action, and keep it all under one roof. Maintenance will be a breeze. And don't forget, the user wants all the features, so we're talking about a full-on clone job. With so many dynamic pages, one fix could mean updates all over the place gamblinginsider.

After a bit of a friendly debate, they go for another round:

See how the numbers are coming together? Now you've got some choices to make. In our case, we went with the highest value, which means this task is getting 8 Story Points. You just rinse and repeat this process for each task in the sprint backlog (or even the product backlog) until you're done. Before you know it, you'll be a Story Points wizard, fine-tuning your estimates as the project unfolds.

Digging this? Leave a comment and share it with your pals. Catch you next time with more Agile goodness!

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