What is Planning Poker?
Planning poker is a technique used to have a healthy discussion during sprint planning, it not only help to identify the problem by discussing deeply about the problem, it also enables team to reach to a comparative complexity which in turn provide a better estimate for the user story or issue in question.
How to do planning poker during sprint?
Prerequisite
- Product owner explains the user story in detail, explain what exactly needs to be done.
- If the team has any question, PO answers the entire question.
- Team start the technical discussion from the point of view of how it will be implemented, as there are all team member involved in the discussion, chances are there are many different angle or prestige about the implementation, which helps to spark a good discussion, outcome of this discussion is that there is a detail level of technology which opens many questions, etc.
- After team understands the user story correctly, SM asks the team to show the card which represses the effort estimate or the comparative complexity of this user story.
- All team member show the card simultaneously, SM see the cards shown by the team members, if there is large difference of number among team member, SM ask why we think it’s 12, not 7.
- Team member give reasoning, about why he thinks this US more complex than other things.
- After the discussion, SM asks the team member to show the card again, normally after 2-3 rounds team agreed to have one coming complexity number.
- Or at least the number they agreed on the number which is not drastically large then other.
- Poker planning card is using Fibonacci numbers.
What are Story points?
Story point is used for effort estimation for a user story, it’s a number without any unit, and sp value represses the comparative complexity from one story to another. Classic example is reading a book or traveling from point A to C. Usually this could be value such as t-shirt size or number of cookies.