Agile Estimation, Scrum and Poker Planning
Last March, Mike Cohn gave a tech talk at Google about Agile estimation, Scrum and the Planning Poker. In this 90 minutes presentation, Mike shares his insights and experience on software estimation using an Agile perspective and by providing many concrete examples to better understand the concepts. He also provides useful information about how an organization can improve its quality and estimation by embracing a couple of Scrum activities such as the Daily Scrum and the Planning Poker. Furthermore, he informs the audience that there is actually a website dedicated to provide a free and useful tool to help organizations engage with the Planning Poker. The tool is convenient for distributed teams as well and suited for organizations who lack a formal system to track and manage their estimation. I never heard of this tool prior to watching this tutorial. I’m sure some managers at work will find it pretty useful too. I hope.
The idea behind planning poker is simple. Individual stories are presented for estimation. After a period of discussion, each participant chooses from his own deck the numbered card that represents his estimate of how much work is involved in the story under discussion. All estimates are kept private until each participant has chosen a card. At that time, all estimates are revealed and discussion can begin again. Planning poker is the best way we’ve found for agile teams to estimate. It’s primary downside has been that all participants had to be sitting in the same room with a physical deck of cards in their hands.
The whole tutorial is available on YouTube as two separate videos (Part 1 and Part 2).
The PowerPoint slides to the videos can be found here.
I highly recommend to any developer, lead, manager and executive to watch this very educating and entertaining video which I’m sure will help you to better estimate your next work activities and products. My suggestion is to watch it with some co-workers during lunch…with pizzas.
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