Where I’m currently working we were finding that our planning games were becoming a bit strained.  We found that when we came to estimating our stories we found that the estimates were a bit varied.

Now, we all know that if the estimations are very different in a planning game you stop to discuss why there are differences in the estimations.  Once the reasoning why the estimations has been discussed, the team can then re-estimate with new knowledge and hopefully things should be more or less the same, if not repeat.

That was OK after a while, but what I mean by varied people were giving funny estimations like 12.5, 4.7 so on and so forth, and no matter now draconian we tried to make the estimation process these silly little estimations kept on cropping up, which slowed the estimation process down and just generally frustrated people.

What we needed was a predefined set of numbers that we can all use, where we can quickly show what our estimation is.

After a bit of searching I found the planning poker cards from Mountain Goat Software.

How you use them is quite interesting, each developer has a pack.  In the pack consists of the following cards :-

• ? = I’m not playing
• 0
• 1/2
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 5
• 8
• 13
• 20
• 40
• 100
• ∞ = Greater than 100

When it comes to estimating the developers all hold up the cards at the same time, if they are mostly all the same the team goes with that estimation, however, if they are varied then the team quickly discuss the variances then re-estimate.

If the developer has no clue about the task the team is estimating they hold up the ? card, if however, they think this story is too huge they show the ∞ card, this is probably an indication that the story is one hell of an epic and really needs to be broken down.  The numbering scale also helps to stop people giving silly estimates of small increments.

When you read around how to use the planning poker game cards, you’ll see that they are used mainly estimating stories, but we also use them for estimating the tasks as well, with great effect.

This may seem a bit unprofessional, but our team have found that it helps to speed up the planning games greatly.  Firstly by introducing a strict numbering system, so we don’t get the x.something nonsense, and introducing an element of fun, and as we all know that time goes by much quicker when you are having fun.