Tech is a relatively new industry. Unlike agriculture, medicine, or even law, there is no storied history of lore guiding the professionals of today in principle. The early days of collaboration in tech were rough. The developers of the era truly knew what it meant to suffer.
In any line of business, setting the right expectations about what's to come puts your boss in a good position to succeed, which will usually make you look good.
Planning Poker, sometimes referred to as "Scrum Poker", bridges the gap between estimating the requirements of your project and the logistics of how everything is going to get done in time.
What Is a User Story?
One of Agile's core tenets: the point of the work is to help other people. Without this qualification, technology in any form is futile and often detrimental to society.
A user story rallies the product vision around this notion. User stories clarify the intended demographic, a possible need or desire, and the benefits that satisfying this need would confer. Engineers can then grab ahold of these bite-sized mission statements and use them to guide them in their work.
For example: I, a member of your intended demographic, am a restaurateur. My waitstaff is having trouble shoehorning customized food orders into our current order-ticketing system. I need a more granular digital menu that allows them to add or omit specific ingredients individually, and I need the system to be easy enough to use during the lunch rush.
The benefits that I'm after? Orders taken quickly and with greater accuracy, and a customer who is given what they've asked for that much sooner. All in a day's work.
Authoring authentic and actionable user stories is vital if your goal is something useful to real people with actual needs. The closer that you can get to their point of view and their pain points, the better that you're going to be at playing this game.
How to Play Scrum Poker
Much like in real poker, teammates hold a roundtable meeting led by the product owner, or some other group leader who acts as the dealer. A list of user stories is agreed upon beforehand.
A deck of cards, each with a number on it, is dealt to each player. The number on each card represents the number of story effort points that the card is worth (Effort points are a way of scoring how difficult or labor-intensive that a user story will be to figure out).
The group leader calls out each user story one by one for the group to mull over. Instead of each participant saying their opinion out loud, however, they instead "vote" anonymously by placing an effort score face-down in a team dogpile. The pool of votes is shuffled, the scores are averaged, and the group discusses the general consensus.
I just got my new #ForgeRock #scrum poker cards. I think I've already chosen my favourite one :-) pic.twitter.com/YttApQKz3X
— Laurent (@laurentvaills) February 26, 2015
Planning a Sprint
According to the Agile methodology, many types of teams thrive in planned "sprints" of two to three weeks.
A sprint provides a developer with a place to begin and an objective to meet; sprints are laid out in advance and break down long-term projects, giving structure to the road ahead. This organizes the group's collective effort and provides context that informs their work.
A project that has been broken down into user stories needs to be mapped out with respect to the team's cycle of sprints. Will a specific task take one hour, two days, or an entire year? Once you've got that figured out, you can work out a plan for where you'd like to be in a couple of weeks.
The team's sprint velocity is equal to the number of effort points that they feel that they can tackle realistically over the course of a single sprint. After working with your team for some time, you will all likely arrive at some sort of agreement as to what this number should actually be. Use what works for you.
A few of the political benefits of Scrum Poker:
- Quantifying some types of missions and compactifying them into technical goals can be difficult. This brings the team together and starts the discussion organically.
- Different viewpoints may take different priorities into consideration. Anonymity allows everybody in the room to make their real opinion heard with confidence, sans judgment.
- There's no pressure to conform; people are able to vote honestly and safely. By deciding in this way, the conversation becomes a friendly game that yields useful results. Team members will never be driven apart by a difference in opinion.
Do you really need more of an excuse to goof off with your coworkers when you can feel your eyes glazing over for the afternoon? You can download an official set of cards to print out from a number of reputable sources or make your own with sticky notes. The choice is yours.
Planning Poker: Game Online With Your Team for a Pittance
Planning Poker is a digital version of the game; there's a Pro plan and a Standard version, the main difference being that the Standard version imposes a ten-guest cap on each poker game. An Enterprise version of the product exists for large corporations, as well.
JIRA integration means that your user stories can be woven directly into your game instantly. It's a convenient way to streamline your session without worrying about getting your crap together. That, and it's a great source of information on the game itself and what it stands to offer your workflow.
About to play scrum poker... #agile #planning pic.twitter.com/uYJSWkFOnb
— Janice Handley (@digitaljanice) August 11, 2015
Scrum Poker: An Exciting New Way to Kill Time in the Break Room
According to PlanningPoker.Com, the term "planning poker" is actually the intellectual property of Mountain Goat Software. We mean no disrespect by mentioning it here. In fact, we actually think that it's pretty cool, no matter how you play it.
Scrum Poker is only one small aspect of Agile, however. In order to make the most of the entire methodology, you should definitely take things from the beginning. It is well worth the ride.