Agile at Work: Planning with Agile User Stories - Planning Poker, Velocity

A strategy used by many agile teams is called ‘Planning Poker’. This card game allows agile teams create the best estimates of stories without the need for ideal and expert information.

When playing ‘planning poker’, it takes assumptions that all team members are experts that will not be able to come to an agreement on time measurements for each story deliverable. This game takes into account the entire team’s knowledge and gives each person their own voice in the project.

With this approach, the team will make estimates for the team in it’s entirety rather then for single team members, and these estimates become more of a bi-product to the game. The goal is to dispel the concept of ‘group-think’ in which people will just agree with whatever the most popular idea is, with the loudest voices killing any disagreement. ‘Planning Poker’ is a simple game that is accurate with agile planning, where each team member will make their estimate in story points rather than hours, before anyone is told what the other is thinking. As a team, they will then discuss one smaller story and assign a value of two, becoming the estimation baseline -the relative estimate’s first half. After that, other stories are then brought out from highest to lowest value via the product owner, with the story being read to the team for them to start estimating immediately. Each member of the team will then estimate by choosing a card face down, with estimates representing a number that includes risk, complexity, time, and other important factors they can think of. After all members are ready, each card is flipped at the same time, in hopes they can come to an agreement, recording the number and size. Once this is completed, the team can move onto the next story repeating the same actions. The ‘Planning poker’ game is one the most important parts of making sure that everyone is included in the estimation phase, giving each person their chance to defend their estimation.

After this game is played, the team can try to understand the velocity of the agile project. Team members will see how much they have worked and to what extent they are committed to future work. This is usually calculated by the project scrum master by creating a number based on the amount of story points the team was able to deliver during each sprint. The velocity has the ability to increase and decrease based on how the team performs during sprints, and it is often abused by senior managers who overextend their employees, bringing down the quality of work to increase the pace. With velocity, it is good to respect the team members and give them manageable workloads that can deliver quality work on time each week, and since these numbers are ultimately created by the team, anyone outside trying to change this number can make the team less useful in the long run.

Works Cited

"Agile at Work: Planning with Agile User Stories." www.lynda.com/Business-Skills-tutorials/		Agile-Work-Planning-Agile-User-Stories/175074-2.html. Accessed 10 Nov. 2017.