Category: planning poker

Planning poker - the real epiphany

March 27, 2009 by Jack Milunsky

Intro
Last week I established three good reasons to go with Story Points and why they're so popular. This week I want to talk about one more important aspect of story points and then provide tips on how to get started estimating in Story Points. I find this is a rather big challenge for teams just learning the ropes.

Lets talk
Scrum is a learning framework. It's been designed specifically with Inspect and Adapt points with a very specific purpose. Because estimating is a cross-functional team activity estimating the backlog is just another opportunity for the team to get together to discuss the task at hand, for the stakeholder or product owner to explain what is expected of the team. This discussion is a great way to build team morale, synchronize expectations and getting everyone singing to the same tune. Because Scrum projects are agile, it’s important that teams engage in discussion to ensure the team stays on the right track. And because the estimation is done in a team setting the estimate is generally more accurate as it represents a cross functional view of the task size, not just the developer view.

Figuring out Business Value with Planning Poker

December 10, 2008 by Peter Stevens

In a perfect world, there is one product owner who knows the market, knows the application and can assign business value to each function on the backlog. But coming up with a dollar value for a feature can be difficult and in a joint venture the problem is compounded, because stakeholders with complementary interests may have a very different basis for valuing a function. There are two product owners, so the situation can be very delicate. How can the two parties agree on priorities for the next release?