The Planning Poker app is the digital solution for making a group of globally distributed developers into a strong, motivated team who all pull together. That’s why our focus is primarily on international teams who want to work together in spite of physical separation. For grooming and planning sessions, Team O’clock offers a planning poker tool that a team can use to estimate tasks and user stories. Members secretly vote on the effort required to complete a task and after everyone has voted, the tool reveals the individual votes and calculates the average estimation, using Fibonacci, T-shirt or custom.
Effective estimation is one of the toughest challenges software developers face in their jobs. Regardless of team size, they need to define, estimate, and distribute work throughout a team. As teams get larger, it becomes even more important to build good habits around planning and estimating work. Lack of planning and estimating reduce confidence in a program, breaks down relationships between the team and the business, and makes development harder on everyone.
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The Accuracy of Group vs. Individual Estimation
According to some study on the accuracy of estimation of effort between individual and group in an experiment for a software project. 20 software professionals from the same company individually estimated the work effort required to implement the same software development project. The participants had different background and roles and the software project had previously been implemented. After that, they formed five groups. Each group agreed on one estimation by discussing and combining of the knowledge among them.
Result – The estimates based on group discussions were more accurate than the individual estimates.
What is Planning Poker?
Planning poker (also known as Scrum poker) is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of development goals in software development.
Steps for Planning Poker
- To start a poker planning session, the product owner or customer reads an agile user story or describes a feature to the estimators.
For example:
“Customer logs in to the reservation system”
“Customer enters search criteria for a hotel reservation” - Team members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table without revealing their estimate (Fibonacci values: 1,2,3,5,8,13,20,40)
- Cards are simultaneously displayed
- The estimates are then discussed and high and low estimates are explained
- Repeat as needed until estimates converge
By hiding the figures in this way, the group can avoid the cognitive bias of anchoring, where the first number spoken aloud sets a precedent for subsequent estimates.
Agile Estimation – Relative vs Absolute
An estimate is nothing more than a well educated guess. We use all the knowledge and experience at hand to make a guess about the amount of time it is going to take. So instead of looking at every new work item separately, why not compare it to previously finished work items? It’s easier for humans to relate to similar items than to guess the actual size of things anyway.
For example, is it closer to this really small thing? Or is it more like this normal sized item? Or is it really huge like that one piece of work we finished last month? Doing relative estimates will not only reduce the amount of time spent on estimating work, it will also heavily increase the accuracy of the estimates.
Our brain is not capable of doing absolute estimates; we always put that new thing that we need to estimate in relationship to things we already know.
Fibonacci sequence and Planning Poker
Planning Poker uses of the Fibonacci sequence to assign a point value to a feature or user story. The Fibonacci sequence is a mathematical series of numbers that was introduced in the 13th century and used to explain certain formative aspects of nature, such as the branching of trees. The series is generated by adding the two previous numbers together to get the next value in the sequence: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on.
For agile estimation purposes, some of the numbers have been changed, resulting in the following series: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100 as shown in the Figure below:
The Interpretation of the point assigned to a poker card is listed in the table below:
| Card(s) | Interpretation |
|---|---|
| 0 | Task is already completed. |
| 1/2 | The task is tiny. |
| 1, 2, 3 | These are used for small tasks. |
| 5, 8, 13 | These are used for medium sized tasks. |
| 20, 40 | These are used for large tasks. |
| 100 | These are used for very large tasks. |
| <infinity> | The task is huge. |
| ? | No idea how long it takes to complete this task. |
| <cup of coffee> | I am hungry 🙂 |
Point vs Hour Value in Estimation
So why use story points instead of time values? Story pointing allows the team to focus on the complexity and time involved in delivering a piece of work. The team compares the new work against work they’ve already done. They compare the complexity of the new assignment against past challenges and rank the difficulty as well as the time required.
For example, we don’t often account for “the cost of doing business.” Meetings, email, code reviews, etc. with time values. But in reality, all these are necessary practices throughout in our daily life, but don’t actually count as “work.” Story points isolate the software development work from the associated logistic work items, so estimates using point based should more consistent than hour base approach.
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Planning Poker Apps
At Red River Software we’re into SCRUM. As part of this framework, we like to use a simple form of Planning Poker. I won’t be discussing the benefits of this approach here, but essentially we (the devs) try to quantify how complex a new application feature will be to implement.
We had a bunch of poker cards printed up to use during planning meetings, and it proved quite effective and popular. However, it was only a matter of time before we all did what geeks do; we pushed the cards aside in favour of an app on our phone. Not really a problem, but when we have a customer sitting in on planning meetings, it’s nice to shove your branded poker cards in their face.
In addition to blatant product placement, we had another issue… what if you can’t get everyone round the table?
To give you some background; Red River has been working on a project for a number of years, and more recently there have been some changes within the development team. Specifically the development team has doubled, and now operates from different countries. This makes it difficult to do our planning poker as we can’t see each other. Simple solution you say? Use web cams or a chat room? Well if you’ve ever been in a video conference with more than 3 people, you’ll know it can be painful. We barely get 8-10 people on a GoToMeeting using voice properly. I digress.
To quote one of the many SCRUM commandments:-
“As a SCRUM master, I want my team to be able offer estimates simultaneously, in order to fairly determine the story point value for a story.”
So we needed a simple solution for playing our planning poker games within a distributed team. As a bonus, we also wanted it to be mobile friendly so we didn’t all need laptops during the planning meeting. We’ve all got smartphones right?
So some key application features:
1. Accessible
2. No-installers
3. Simple to use
4. Spectator mode
5. Chat
I could have made that list even simpler, but I wanted to try some new things out. The technologies of choice are NodeJS and plain old HTML.
I invite you to watch this space as we develop it further.
Planning Poker App Android
While you wait, you can use this excellently simple app for your planning sessions…
Scrum Poker cards for Android and iPhone.