Planning Poker in Scrum

1. A Moderator, who will not play, chairs the meeting.
2. The Product Owner provides a short overview.
3. The team asks questions and clarifies assumptions and risks.
4. A summary of the discussion is recorded by the Project Manager.
5. Each individual lays a card face down representing their estimate.
6. Everyone calls their cards simultaneously by turning them over.
7. People with high estimates and low estimates are given a time box to offer their justification for their estimate and then discussion continues.
8. Repeat this process until a consensus is reached.

 Planning Poker is a fast, card based approach to team estimation. Team members are given cards with the numbers 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, and 100 on them to represent development effort estimates.

User stories are presented to the team and discussed as a group to round out understanding, Then everyone selects a card that represents their estimated effort for the development. The cards are kept private until everyone has selected a card and then they are all revealed together.

If the resulting estimates are close then it is safe to record the estimate and move onto the next story. If there is significant divergence then people are invited to discuss why they believe it will be so different (for example last time we added a column to the account table it took 8hrs to regression test the legacy applications). Then in light of this new information people estimate again, as before only revealing their cards when everyone has selected a card. The process iterates until sufficient consensus has been reached.

Planning Poker takes the group based consensus building and anonymous estimating concepts of Wideband Delphi estimation and packages them in a faster, more enjoyable format.