Joakim Karlsson

Chris and I have been helping a team introduce agile software development for a while now. When we are running a planning meeting, we have usually used planning poker for estimation. But we seem to be using planning poker less and less.

I like planning poker. It has a lot of advantages. In particular it helps with giving everyone on the team a voice. If you make sure to have everyone show their estimate before you begin discussing the details, you’ll stand a better chance of getting estimates that are not biased by the opinions of the stronger and louder team members. Brilliant!

There are some shortcomings to planning poker if you don’t have a good facilitator though.

It is easy to lose track of the relative nature of estimates. As you are addressing each story one by one it is quite easy for teams to forget to compare it to the other stories. This leads to uneccessary discussions about details that really aren’t relevant at this point.

As an alternative to using planning poker, you might want to try a sorting exercise. Instead of trying to attach an estimate to a story directly, we first have the team sort index cards. The smallest/easiest/least complex on the far left, and the largest/hardest/most complext on the far right. Don’t think in terms of points, ideal days, gummy bears, or whatever estimation unit you’re using. Just sort!

When that part of the exercise is complete, you have all the story cards lined up. Next, have the team think of the possible story points as buckets. We usually use 1, 2, 3, 5, and 8. The mission is to decide what cards belong in what bucket.

Begin with the leftmost card and ask “Is this a 1?” Have all team members do a thumb up or thumb down. If all agree, continue with the next card and repeat until you get a thumbs down. Have the team quickly negotiate which cards make in to the first bucket and which don’t. Continue the same procedures with the next estimation bucket, and repeat until you got an estimate for all cards.

Oh, and in order to keep bias from the more vocal team members to a minimum – have the team perform the sorting in silence.

For more information about this, check out this post by Kane Mar.