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What is Planning Poker? Planning poker is a prevalent estimation technique typically used in Agile based software development companies. It is an easy, fun and consensus based method used to estimate complex feature development efforts with better precision and predictability. The term “Planning Poker” was coined by James Grenning and promoted heavily by Mike Cohn. A typical Planning Poker is a set of cards, just like playing cards, but now we have numerous plugins, apps and software programs available as an alternate, especially useful for geo-distributed teams. Background An estimation has an essential place in the software development world as any scaled development, especially within remote teams, can make the cost, resources and feature availability difficult for business. With a proven and widely accepted estimation practice like Planning Poker, earlier mentioned challenges become much more transparent with potential visibility on cost, resource usage and time to market. Via Planning Poker, teams can estimate a feature development effort without getting influenced by other participants, thus making effort estimates reasonable, predictable and pretty much a standard practice. Planning Poker is based on the Fibonacci series to assign a point cost to a feature or user story. The Fibonacci series is a series of numbers generated by adding the two preceding numbers collectively to get the next number in the series: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. An example illustration of Planning Poker cards may be referred in the image below. (Image credit: Wikipedia) For Agile estimation reasoning, few of the numbers were changed, resulting in the sequence like 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100. There are some special category cards included as well like ½, ∞, ? and ☕ for example. The values constitute the range of story points, ideal days, or any other unit the team prefers. There are several cards of a single unit in a Planning Poker deck and it is possible to use multiple decks given the number of participants. One of the significant reasons to use planning poker is to avoid the influence of the other participants. It enables individual thought process on reasoning and complexities hence as a best practice; all the participants show their cards at the same time after a round of feature related discussion. How does it work? Firstly, the cards are distributed among development team members, ensuring that everyone has a minimum of one card from the Fibonacci series and special category cards. The “Product Owner” role reads out an Agile user story or feature description to the development team. An example user story for a sample development sprint may be: A customer walks into a coffee shop and presses the token machine button. A token number is generated in sequential order, printed on a paper, dispensed for the customer and updated in the reservation queue. Development team members make estimates of the number of story points by simultaneously presenting the cards to everyone. After the reflection period (typically 1 or 2 minutes), excessive and occasional estimates are explained. The goal here is to retain only one value of story points hence in tandem with reasoning and analysis; the process is repeated till all the estimates converge. Afterwards, respective estimates are updated in the tracking software for a specific work item under Story Point field (or any other preferred unit field) for resource and sprint planning purpose. It is essential to know that for any uncertainty or incomplete requirement, the infinite (∞) or question mark (?) cards are selected respectively. Best Practices A minimum of 5 people is recommended for a good Planning Poker estimation session. The level of knowledge shouldn’t be uneven; for example, an SME and a trainee employee shouldn’t estimate individually. A pairing approach comes handy in this sort of situation. Moderation of the Planning Poker session is always recommended to ensure everyone can express themselves, avoid soft consensus and facilitate time monitoring.