Top tips for Planning Poker

Planning Poker is a simple exercise that delivers outstanding results when performed well. It can quickly lead the team to a shared understanding of the work and an accurate estimate of the size of the work. However I often see it performed sub optimally, leading to waste, inaccurate estimates, misunderstanding and division within the team.

These are my Top Tips for performing Planning Poker in an efficient, effective and fun manner.

Bring Reference Stories

Bring a range of Reference User Stories on index cards to your estimation session. I find that a range of sizes and types of work helps immensely when we are sizing. I recommend that you have between 3 to 10 Reference Stories, in the size range of 1 Story Points to 8 or even 13 Story Points. The reference story index cards can just have the story title written on them (provided the team is well aware of what the story entails).

Bringing these reference stories serves two purposes. 1. There is no need to recall the Reference Stories from memory, they are right there in front of you. This makes the process of sizing stories easier and faster. 2. It stops ‘size creep’ / ‘story point inflation’, which unintentionally affects some teams.

Involve Everyone

Everyone should display an estimate each round. We do not want the situation where Developers put out a ‘?’ card each time there is a testing focused story and vis-versa.

But how can Testers size Development work you ask? By using Relative Estimation along with asking some probing questions, is the answer. The questions that we need to train the team members to ask, highlight the differences of the Un-sized Story to the Reference Stories. 

Some sample probing questions:

• Testers can ask: How many components does it affect? How many components were affected in the reference story?
• Testers can ask: How much development work is there per component, compared to this reference story? 
• Developers can ask: Do we need to test it on multiple platforms, like we did for this reference story?
• Developers can ask: Are there more functional areas to tests than this reference story?

With this information out on the table, everyone should have enough information to compare the Un-sized Story to the Reference Stories and hence select a Relative Estimate. This is one the key reasons that Planning Poker works in a cross functional team.

Talk about Complexity, Effort & Doubt

Story Points are made up of complexity, effort,& doubt, with Complexity being the most important aspect. Everyone in the team needs to understands what these all mean and how it relates to their work.

Talk about:

• More/less complexity (more interactions between components, technical debt that makes it harder to make changes, difficult algorithms, availability of assistance from an expert in the area, availability of documentation that explains how it all works, etc.)
• More/less effort (extra tasks, extra components to work on, less test cases to create, ability to reuse existing work, available of a tool that automates part of the work, etc.)
• More/less doubt (lack of tests, uncertainty regarding the current design, unclear expectations from the Product Owner, new technology, not sure if the documentation covers it, etc.)

Don’t talk about numbers

Don’t let team members talk about changing your estimate. E.g.  'I will go down to a 5.' 'Ok, ok it's a 2.', ‘Alright I’ll go up’.

This results in or is the result of peer pressure. ‘Story Points are only one third of the reason for estimating’, peer pressure prevents the team from gaining the other two thirds worth of benefits. 

Also try to avoid talking about how much time it will take to do things. ‘Story Points do not equate to Time’, so we should minimise our mention of time.

Instead of talking about numbers, get the team to focus on Effort, Complexity & Doubt, and then re-vote.

Choose the Majority answer

Create a team rule that ‘When there is a lack of consistency in estimates after two rounds of estimation; the estimate which the majority of team members have chosen is selected as the estimate.’ 

Picking the majority answer instead of picking the highest answer (or the lowest) ensures that the team’s estimates will average out over the long term. Always picking the highest estimate will inflate the team’s estimates, and lead to less predictability.

In the above example, with 4 votes to 3 votes, the team would choose 5 as their estimate.

Use estimation to confirm shared understanding

Watch out for stalled/circular discussions and call for the team to estimate. 

Sometimes you will find that the team all throws out the same estimate! When they do you can move on. Even though the conversation was going around in circles the team had a similar idea of the size of the work. Which means you can sort out the details in the sprint, instead of trying to sort it out in your estimation session.

If some team members do throw out different estimates; then you need to head back to the discussion to try and clear it up. The good news is that the attempt at sizing will have only taken a minute or so.

Combined result

Once you and your team are practiced in how to run an effective Planning Poker session; it should be fast, accurate and fun.

Do you have any other tips that have lead your team towards great Planning Poker sessions?

Interested in more tips?

• Top Tips for Retrospectives
• Top Tips for Project Retrospectives

Interested in estimation?

• Fast Estimation
• Story Points are only one third of the reason to estimate
• Story Points do not equate to time

Training available in South East QLD, Australia

If this article was interesting to you, then your team would likely benefit from face to face training on Agile Estimation. I run a one-hour Agile Estimation training session, that is highly interactive, immensely fun and teaches the foundation of agile estimation along with how to effectively run Planning Poker as well as Fast Estimation. Please contact me to set up a training session for your team: andrewrusling@hotmail.com

Story Points do not equate to Time

A.k.a. Story Points allow us to separate Estimation from Commitment

I have known (through experience) for a long time that Story Points are a great way for teams to estimate their work. However it has taken me a long time to come up with an explanation that can convey what I already knew. If you are interested in that explanation, then please read on.

Story Points vs. Ideal Days

Story Points are an estimate of the Size of the Story. Where Size is the combination of Complexity, Effort & Doubt:

• Complexity – Difficulty, hard algorithms, complex logic extra, abstract concepts.
• Effort – Raw effort / grunt work. I.e. Making a simple parameter change to hundreds of similar method calls.
• Doubt – Uncertainty around how will we build it or what it is that we need to build.

Ideal Days or Ideal Hours is an estimate of how long it will take to complete the Story.

So while Story Points are made up of a single element: ‘Size’, Ideal Days are made up of two elements:  ‘Duration’ and ‘Size’.

Story Points cannot be equated to Ideal Days/Hours because they are made of different elements. i.e. Size vs. Duration & Size.

Here is an example that illustrates my point

Story A is estimated by the team to be 1 Story Point. Story B is estimated by the team to be 8 Story Points. Suppose that we get our two brand new graduates to work on Story A, while our two experienced Senior Developers work on Story B. Story A is completed in 5 working days, Story B is also completed in 5 days. Now suppose that we had given Story B to our new
 graduates, while our experienced Senior Developers worked on Story A. In this scenario Story A is completed in 1 day, while our graduates will struggle on eventually delivering Story B after 30 days! While the Size of the Story remained the same the Duration to complete them varied dramatically based on who worked on the Story.

Estimation vs. Commitment

We use Story Points because it allows the team to focus on estimating one element; the Size of the Story. When sizing the Story we do not have to consider Who will work on it, or consider Committing to the Story.

During Sprint Planning we decide which Stories to Commit to the Sprint Backlog. This is where the team considers who will work on which story; hence combing the elements of Size, Who & Duration.

Estimating in Story Points allows for Estimation and Commitment to be separated, giving better results for each.

Please give it a try, and let me know how it turns out for you.

Interested in estimation?

• Fast Estimation
• Story Points are only one third of the reason to estimate
• Top Tips for Planning Poker

Training available in South East QLD, Australia

If this article was interesting to you, then your team would likely benefit from face to face training on Agile Estimation. I run a one-hour Agile Estimation training session, that is highly interactive, immensely fun and teaches the foundation of agile estimation along with how to effectively run Planning Poker as well as Fast Estimation. Please contact me to set up a training session for your team: andrewrusling@hotmail.com

Story Points are only one third of the reason for estimating

“One’s destination is never a place, but rather a new way of looking at things.”
From: Miller, H. (1957). Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymus Bosch

Assigning some Story Points to a User Story may seem like the point of agile estimation; however in my eyes it just signifies the end of the process. 

For me the goals of agile estimation are to build a shared understanding in the team of what the story is and to build team consensus around what the rough estimate in Story Points should be.

The journey that the team goes through to come up with the estimate, is more important than the number that is assigned at the end of the process. Sure the assigned estimate assists with planning, however the knowledge that the team gains during discussion will help with their understanding of what they are delivering, why and how they will go about it. I often hear discussions on topics such as: user needs, business value, design, potential new User Stories, testing approach, development approach, how this User Story fits into the Epic, which are all valuable.

Here is a brief summary of the benefits that the team gain by going through an agile estimation process.

Assigning Story Points to each User Story supports

• Grooming – identify stories that are large / candidates for splitting, identifying inefficiencies such as splitting an 8 pointer into two 5 pointers – should we do it as an 8 pointer to save overall time?
• Sprint planning – roughly creating a sprint backlog based on average velocity.
• Sprint planning – switching User Stories of equal Story Points in/out, up/down priority.
• Release planning – using the combination of average velocity and story points of remaining stories to provide a rough view of our status.

Discussions build a Shared Understanding, which supports

• Grooming – effective ways of splitting a User Story into multiple User Stories.
• User Story Planning – splitting user Stories into a set of tasks that will work for the whole team.
• Development – design ideas, implementation approach, testing approach, etc.
• Identifying issues – such as impediments, dependencies, etc.

Using consensus to arrive at the Story Points supports

• Sprint planning – with a stable average velocity and consensus on the Story Point of each User Story, there will be less second guessing of what to pull into the sprint.
• Commitment to delivering the Sprint Backlog – consensus around the estimate, leads the team owning the sprint commitment. i.e. “it was my estimate, so I will push to finish the story within the sprint”.

Interested in estimation?

• Fast Estimation
• Story Points do not equate to time
• Top Tips for Planning Poker

Running a World Café

This is a brief summary of my experience of running a World Café.

I volunteered to run a World Café, themed around Organisational Impediments and how to solve them, for my local agile Meet-Up group ‘Brisbane Agile’*

I deliberately kept my preparation to a minimum. I held some discussions with the Meet-Up Organiser, regarding how we would run the event and set up the room. Apart from that I created a few wall charts to help smooth out proceedings and came up with some sample Organisational Impediments. These were a backup in case the participants were reluctant to volunteer their own items for discussion. This word document contains the wall charts I used.

We set up the room with five groups of tables that seated about six people each. Seating for thirty people was wishful thinking, by the start time we had two full tables. The low numbers were probably due to the event being event in the Christmas season.

While guests were entering and eating the free pizza, I wondered around introduced myself. Asking what had brought them here and suggesting that they post their question or topic on the provided wall charts. From member I think we ended up with eight topics being suggested by the participants.

After brief introductions from our sponsor and the meet-up organiser, I got everyone on their feet and used dot voting to select two of the eight suggested topics. There were a couple of clear winners, which made it easy to start the two tables discussing each topic.

As a group we decided as a group to drop down to ten minute discussion rounds. This allowed us to get through four topics in total.

I time boxed us to ten minutes of discussion, followed by a couple of minutes to switch tables and then another ten minutes of discussion. The conversations that occurred where very animated. It was a real struggle to stop them and get us on to the next round. After the first topics had been discussed by both groups we had the topic leader provide a quick overview which sparked even more discussion.

With roughly half of our planned time used up we used dot voting again to select another two topics and do it all again. Again we had very energetic discussions, which were constrained by the ten minute boundary.

The result was these sheets of butchers paper, which fail to convey the excitement and energy that was in the room.

Result: Agile Contract Models

Result: Introducing Agile into a large organisation

Result: What is more effective Scrum of Iterative Waterfall and Why?

Result: Agile estimation

We ended up with some very satisfied attendees. Some left with a much better understanding of agile, another walked away with an action plan for how he will sell agile to the management group in the company he has just joined. Everyone seemed to walk away happy.

I whole heartedly recommend you to run your own World Café; it is easy to set up, exciting and harness the energy of the participants.

*At the time of the World Café it was actually a separate group ‘Brisbane Scrum and Agile’ Group, however it has since merged with the ‘Brisbane Lean and Agile’ group to become ‘Brisbane Agile’.

Photo by: Travel Fools of America 

Fast Estimation

Imagine you have just completed some Product Discovery work and have a pile of User Stories that need to be estimated. You look at the pile and think, wow that will take hours to estimate using Planning Poker. I just want rough estimates so that we can put together a release plan. We know the plan will change in the future, but we need some starting point. What can I do? 

The answer is Fast Estimation. 

Fast Estimation is derived from Planning Poker. With some preparation and a 1 hour workshop it is common for a team to estimate about 30 User Stories. Teams I have worked with have successfully used it to estimate new functionality, automation of processes, improvements to internal practices and organisational change work.

While estimation is the main objective of the Fast Estimation process, another significant benefit you get for free is Shared Understanding. By this I mean the discussions that occur help to clarify in the minds of the team members what work is required, how it inter-relates and how big the entire backlog is. The knowledge that is gained about the backlog as a whole can often be more valuable then the estimates assigned to individual User Stories.

Fast Estimation Process

Preparation
Write out the User Stories to be estimated onto Index Cards of the same colour. A short cut that often works well is to just write the Title of the User Story on the index card and have the details of the User Story on hand during the session (i.e. in an electronic tool, or a printed spreadsheet, etc).

Find one to five Reference User Stories. These are User Stories that are well understood by the team and will act as a reference point for the upcoming comparative estimation. Ideally the team will have recently completed those User Stories or have at least estimated them in Story Points. The Reference User Stories should have differing Story Points, ideally being in the 2 to 20 range. I recommend at least three reference User Stories and usually aim for five, however you can get away with one. The case where your team is new and does not have any reference User Stories; sounds like a topic for another day. If you are really stuck just pick a User Story that you think is 3 Story Points, and use that for your Reference User Story.

Write out the Reference User Stories onto Index Cards of a different colour to the cards used for the User Stories to be estimated.

Schedule a 1 hour meeting in a room that has a long table, big enough for the team to gather around.

During the workshop
Set the scene for the workshop by explaining the following points

• The objective of the workshop is to roughly estimate this stack of User Stories (show them the stack of Index Cards so that they can see how many there are), this will help to emphasise that time is of the essence. 
• Fast Estimation will only rough estimates for these User Stories. 
• There will be lots of assumptions and hence the estimates will not be very accurate.
• The team will get another chance to re-estimate these User Stories in normal grooming session prior to starting work on the User Stories.

Layout one set up Planning Poker cards on a long conference table in ascending order i.e. 0, 0.5 .. 110, ∞.  It is a good idea to leave more space between the lower / middle numbers as hopefully more of the User Stories will end up there. If there are lots of User Stories at the large end of the scale that is a whole different problem, good luck with that ;).

Place the Reference User Stories below the Planning Poker card that corresponds to its Story Points. As per the picture below.

Picture 1: Planning Poker cards and Reference User Stories, with un-estimated User Stories at the bottom.

Confirm with the participants that they understand the Reference User Stories and agree with the Story Points for each. You may need to adjust one or more of these. Once you progress past this point, do not change the Reference User Story – Story Points any more these are now set in stone.

Divide up the User Stories roughly and hand them out to the participants.

Give the participants a couple of minutes to quickly read their set of User Stories to themselves.

Pick someone at random and ask them to read out their User Story and then place it underneath the Planning Poker card that corresponds to their estimate. Only allow a brief time for this. Ask the group if they are happy with that estimate and discuss/move it as necessary. Encourage participants to move the card if they disagree and to explain their justification at the same time.

Picture 2: First User Story Estimated

Ask the group if there are any similar User Stories in peoples stacks. If so, repeat step 8 for those User Stories. Once there are no more similar User Stories pick another person at random and repeat step 8 for that User Story.

Work your wait through all of the User Stories, placing and discussing, finding similar User Stories, etc. etc.

Once all of the cards are all in position you can quickly write the Story Point estimate on each Index Card and gather them up.

Picture 3: All User Stories estimated 

As a final wrap up to the meeting it is again worth mentioning that the team may need to re-estimate these User Stories using Planning Poker before taking them into a sprint planning meeting.

A variation I have tried that did not work as well
After handing out the index cards, everyone places their cards at once in a big rush of activity. Then the team discusses them and re-estimates them as appropriate. This approach raises the energy in the room but it is a bit more confusing. Individuals will find it confusing to place their cards without the understanding of the backlog that they build up while discussing the User Stories one by one. The benefit to this approach is that very rough estimates are assigned to all of the User Stories up front, so if you run out of time at least you have everything estimated.

Teaching Fast Estimation
I have an example game to teach people Fast Estimation which extends on the fruit estimation of Planning Poker that I learnt in the Certified Scrum Master course taught by Rowan Bunning.

Write out the following Items To Cook on Index Cards, and place ‘B.L.T’ your three Story Point Reference User Story  (I have found that due to the simplicity of these User Stories 1 reference story is enough). 

Ask the participant to estimate cooking these items from scratch. I.e. for Eggs Benedict they are expected to make their own hollandaise sauce. Guide them through the Fast Estimation process,  this game usually takes less then 10 minutes (provided the participants are familiar with Planning Poker and Story Points).

Items to Cook

• Eggs Benedict
• Tin Baked Beans
• Fruit Salad
• B.L.T.
• Crispy skinned Salmon
• Poached Eggs Soufflé
• Cheese Burger
• 64 Cup Cakes
• Garden Salad
• Alacarte, 3 courses for two
• Cheese Cake
• Duck Ala orange
• Caesar Salad
• Alacarte, 3 courses for ten
• Lasagne
• Pineapple upside down cake
• Burrito’s
• Mashed Potato
• Beef Korma
• Banoffee Pie
• Fish & Chips
• 12 Fancy cup cakes

Interested in estimation?

• Story Points are only one third of the reason to estimate
• Story Points do not equate to time
• Top Tips for Planning Poker

Related Reading
I can recommend these blogs for other great approaches to estimating stacks of User Stories:

• Steve Bockman - Team Estimation Game 
• James Grenning - Planning Poker Party 

Training available in South East QLD, Australia

If this article was interesting to you, then your team would likely benefit from face to face training on Agile Estimation. I run a one-hour Agile Estimation training session, that is highly interactive, immensely fun and teaches the foundation of agile estimation along with how to effectively run Planning Poker as well as Fast Estimation. Please contact me to set up a training session for your team: andrewrusling@hotmail.com