The Planning Poker Technique

Planning Poker is a technique the Scrum team uses to estimate the effort required to perform a task. It uses values (in numbers, not time) to represent the complexity of a task. Each of the Scrum Team members receives a set of cards –each of them representing a value– to analyze a specific task. Every team member estimates how complex the task is by picking a card and placing it face down to avoid influence on the selection criteria of other team members. At the end, as in Poker, everyone turns its card simultaneously and shows the team the value selected to estimate the task.

This tool encourages the Scrum team members to provide an estimation, share opinions, ideas, and concerns, and –to the extent possible– reach a unanimous agreement on the estimation values.

One of the main parameters used to estimate in Planning Poker is the experience, which helps to compare impartially and unbiased the difficulty of a user’s story to another one.

Usually, when a project starts, there’s a lot of uncertainty. Thus, one of the main advantages of this technique is that it focuses on continuous feedback during each sprint, which reduces uncertainty while developing the project, so that knowledge acquired becomes the basis for new estimations.