Planning Poker

Today Tommy brought his Planning Poker deck to our Planning Game session (see previous post). I've only read about planning poker before but never used it in practice.

The Deck:

The Planning Poker deck is like an ordinary deck of cards but instead of clubs, diamonds, hearts and spades with different values there are only numbers representing days. On the back of each card there is a color to group them. Each color consists of thirteen cards numbered 0, 1/2, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100. It also have two "wildcards", one coffeecup meaning take a break and one question mark meaning we have to discuss this.

Planning Poker Deck

Game play:

We were four players. Each player picked a pile of cards with the same color. As in most card games you are not supposed to show you cards face to your competitors. Then we read one of our User Stories and each player played the card representing the number of days they believed it would take to finish it. Estimates included automated acceptance tests as this is the definition of done in our case. The card you played was placed at the table with face down, and then turned by all players simultaneously so you wouldn't cheat:) If all players played the same estimate this estimate was written down on the User Story. If all players played different estimates we discussed back and fourth until we all felt comfortable with the estimate. Equally if some player played a much higher or lower value than the rest of us. The coffeecup or the question mark was not used, maybe next time.

Even though there's no real competition as there are no winner, except the whole team if the estimates are good, it was much more fun than just sit down and do estimates. I really recommend you to try it.