Should Managers Be Quails During Planning Poker?

by Laurie Williams

In recent years, many agile software development teams have used a Planning Poker practice to estimate the effort needed to complete the features chosen to be implemented in an iteration and/or release. Planning Poker is "played" by the team as a part of the iteration planning meeting, which is attended by product managers, project managers, software developers, testers, usability engineers, security engineers, and others. With Planning Poker, the customer or marketing representative explains each feature. In turn, the team discusses the work involved in fully implementing and testing a feature until they believe that they have enough information to estimate the effort. Each team member then privately and independently estimates the effort in "story points" (unit-less measures of effort relative to previously completed requirements). Team members are constrained to estimating from a set of possible story point values (most commonly 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, and 100) that are the relative amount of effort necessary for the implementation, including software development, usability engineering, testing, and document authoring/updating. The team members reveal their estimates simultaneously. Next, the team members with the lowest and highest estimates explain their estimates to the group. Discussion ensues until the group is ready to re-vote on their estimates. More estimation rounds take place until the team can come to a consensus on a quantity of story points for the requirement. Most often, only two (maybe three) Planning Poker rounds are necessary on a particular feature before teams reach consensus.