Conducting effective retrospectives is essential for fostering continuous improvement within agile teams. To optimize this process and achieve better outcomes, it's crucial to utilize the right tools. In this article, we'll explore five top retro tools that can greatly enhance your retrospective sessions, making them more organized, collaborative, and productive.

Chpokify Retro: A free and open-source retrospective tool, Chpokify Retro is specifically designed for project managers at any level. It facilitates collaboration with remote teams, ensuring everyone stays in sync. This tool enables anonymous reflections, idea grouping, and voting on priorities. By gathering valuable data, it provides insightful analytics. Chpokify Retro also integrates seamlessly with Chpokify Planning Poker. Its primary goal is to create non-toxic and healthy team environments, offering stress-free task tracking and facilitating productive retrospectives. Supports various retrospective formats, such as Keep Drop Start, Glad Mad Sad, 4L, Start Stop Continue,  What Went Well, Sailbot. The source code for Chpokify can be found on GitHub at https://github.com/vborodulin/chpokify.

Retrium: Widely recognized as a popular retro tool, Retrium offers a comprehensive set of features to facilitate retrospective meetings. It provides a variety of retrospective formats, including Start, Stop, Continue, and more, allowing teams to select the approach that best suits their needs. Real-time collaboration is a highlight of Retrium, enabling team members to contribute and discuss ideas simultaneously. Customizable templates, actionable insights, and integration with project management tools make Retrium a powerful option for teams of all sizes.

EasyRetro: With its emphasis on simplicity and user-friendliness, EasyRetro is a visually appealing retro tool that prioritizes ease of use. Its intuitive interface allows teams to quickly create virtual boards and invite members to contribute their thoughts and ideas. EasyRetro supports various retrospective formats, such as Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For (4Ls), and What Went Well, What Can Be Improved (WWW/WCBI). Real-time collaboration, idea voting, and action item tracking streamline the retrospective experience for teams.

Miro: While known as a versatile collaboration platform, Miro can be effectively utilized for retrospectives as well. It offers a wide range of retrospective templates, enabling teams to choose visual formats such as timelines, mind maps, and fishbone diagrams. Miro provides a virtual whiteboard where team members can add sticky notes, comment on ideas, and engage in discussions. Its extensive collaboration features allow distributed teams to participate in retrospectives as if they were in the same room.

Trello: Primarily known as a project management tool, Trello can also be leveraged for retrospectives. Teams can create boards and utilize lists or cards to represent different retrospective categories or ideas. Trello's flexibility allows teams to design their own retro workflow and adapt it to their specific requirements. The drag-and-drop interface enables easy movement of cards between lists, task assignment, and progress tracking on action items. Integration with other productivity tools makes Trello a convenient option for incorporating retrospectives into the team's existing workflow.

In conclusion, effective retrospectives are vital for continuous improvement in agile teams. By leveraging the right retro tools like Chpokify, Retrium, EasyRetro, Miro, or Trello, teams can streamline their retrospective process, encourage active participation, and drive meaningful action items. Each tool offers unique features and benefits, so it's important to choose one that aligns with your team's preferences and requirements. Happy retrospecting! 🎉

Let’s face it? Planning Poker is a one fun game and it can really become your best pastime. It’s fun, it’s exciting and most importantly there are so many different types of it that you can choose from. To become a pro in planning poker, you should know about the planning poker technique and how it works. If this is the first time you are hearing about this technique then stick with us a little longer because today we are going to talk about planning poker in detail.

What Is Planning Poker?

Planning poker is a scrum that helps bring together several expert opinions on the agile estimation of a particular project. In such agile planning, everyone’s included. From the database engineers to testers and programmers, they are all a part of it. As these people are well aware of how the software works, they are best suited for the estimation task than anyone else.

How Does Planning Poker Work?

When the agile planning exercise starts, every estimator is provided with a deck of planning poker cards. Every card comes with a valid estimation on it. It can be anything from 1,2,3,5,18,20,40,100 or any other number. To estimate the story or theme of each user, the moderator reads out the description to them. If the estimators have any questions, they can easily ask the moderator/owner and he has to reply to those questions accordingly. However, the main goal of planning poker isn’t just to come up with an estimate that can withstand scrutiny in the future. In fact, it’s all about coming up with a valid estimate that can come without costing too much.

After the discussion, each and every estimator privately selects the planning poker card. The particular card he selects represents the agile estimation. After choosing the cards, all the estimators have to turn over their cards and then show them to one another so that everyone knows about the estimation of each other.

It’s completely normal that your estimates differ. The ones with the highest and the lowest estimates have to explain their point of view in order for the other team members to know where they are coming from. During the agile planning session, the moderator has to take down notes so that he has all the information required when the story is being tested and programmed.

After the discussion is completed, the estimators have to re-estimate the values by selecting different cards. It often happens that the estimate converges by the second round. If that doesn’t happen then you need to keep repeating the process again and again until everyone agrees on one estimate that’s to be used for the story. Usually, it takes around 3 rounds at max to reach the final estimation goal.

Some Useful Tips For Planning Poker In Scrum

You’ll obviously come across some challenges during planning poker but with these tips, everything will fall into place;

1-Make sure that the discussions are productive

One of the best tips to use is to buy a sand-timer. Every time the discussion is about to start you can turn the sand timer and discuss till the sand runs out. This way, all of your team members will be able to learn how to be productive with the discussion and you’ll also get to start the next round right faster.

2-Break the game into small sessions

If you want you can play planning poker with a subset of the team. It’s not recommended but if you have several stories to estimate, you sure can use this tip and make the game easier for yourself.

3-Make Sure That The Time Is Right

You’ll have to play planning poker on two different occasions so it’s better to start early in the day instead of waiting for the night.

Play Planning Poker Online With Chpokify

Now that you know what planning poker is and how it works, it’ll be easier for you to play with your team. If you want to make the most out of the game then try chpokify.com.

Playing planning poker with Chpokify is quite easy and to get started with it, you just have to follow a few simple steps;

1-Register yourself to get your own space

2-Invite your team members

3-Start the session and create stories

4-Vote and Moderate

5-Finalize and Analyze

The best part about this platform is that it’s free for people who are only a team of 5. If you are 5 people who want to play planning poker, you can use Chpokify for free but if you are a bigger team with more members then you’ll have to pay a very small fee for it.

Conclusion

Planning poker in scrum can be the best thing you can do to make the most out of your free time. This estimation technique is exciting and fun so don’t wait for any further and try it right away!

Planning poker (also known as scrum poker) is a sophisticated software development approach based on consensus to assess effort or related development goals. The Chpokify planning poker method has been modified to planning poker online.

For the agile assessment of a project, several expert views are combined in Scrum's Planning Poker.

In this type of agile planning, we include all analysts, user interaction designers, programmers, testers, and database engineers. They are better suited than anyone else to the assessment task because they represent all software project disciplines.

Planning poker can help agile teams estimate the time and effort required to complete each initiative on their product backlog. This gamified technique is known as planning poker because participants use physical cards. These playing card-style cards are used to estimate the number of narrative points for each backlog tale or task up for consideration.

This process was created to help software organizations estimate development periods more correctly, build consensus among cross-functional team members, and plan the team's work more tactically.

Planning Poker Working

The description for the user history is read by a moderator (usually by-product owner or analyst) or is subject to estimation. The product owner answers all estimator questions. There will be a debate. The goal of Scrum Planning Poker, on the other hand, is not to generate an estimate that will hold up to future surveys.

On the contrary, we would like a valuable estimate at a reasonable cost. Estimates will probably vary substantially. And that's all right, that's all right. The top and bottom estimators explain their views so that the team understands their sources.

In this agile strategy meeting, the moderator observes that this will help plan and test the story.

In the second round, the forecast often converges. If not, repeat until the team accepts a single estimate of the story. Agile estimation often takes more than three rounds to reach the desired outcome.

Poker tips in scrum planning poker

Here are some suggestions of the most common challenges in planning poker online.

• Maintain productive discussions: Take a two-minute sand timer and allow anyone to start it whenever they want. The next round of Poker planning cards will be distributed when the sand is gone. In the context of agile planning, this teaches teams how to estimate faster.
• Bridge your time: Poker planning can be done with a team subset. This is not ideal, but it is a viable way to determine many stories when a new project starts.
• Buy a two-minute sand timer to keep conversations productive and let anybody start the meeting whenever they want. The next round of Planning Poker cards will be dealt out to the participants when the sand is depleted. This teaches teams to estimate in an agile planning environment more rapidly.

Divide your time accordingly: You can play planning Poker with your team's subset. That is not ideal, but it is a viable option if you can estimate a large number of stories at the beginning of a new project.

What Is the Process of Planning Poker?

Planning poker brings together stakeholders of each unit to agree on the estimated effort needed to reverse the initiative.

Product owners, developers, UX designers, QA testers, and software developers may be engaged in an agile software organization.

Planning Poker Benefits

The online game Planning Poker is a great resource for Agile teams when choosing items on an agile roadmap. Who doesn't want to play poker at work? When work and play are combined, it motivates people to participate and produce the best results.

The beauty of this estimation technique is that each person must have their own set of reasons for why their estimates are correct. To defend their estimate, participants must consider all aspects of implementation efforts.

• Planning poker is a highly engaging activity in which each participant must actively contribute by providing input and answering questions as they arise.
• The planning session brings everyone together and forces everyone to interact with one another, and it also serves as a team-building activity. People who know each other well can work well together to achieve their goals.
• With the entire team in the room, you can expect varying estimates based on their solution approach. Out-of-the-box thinkers may be able to provide you with an optimized/better solution at a lower cost.
• Introverts and quiet people are given equal importance to speak during these sessions, which helps them open up. Quiet people may have better thoughts, and when they give an "outlier" estimate, they get the full attention of the whole team to present their views.

Planning poker is one of, if not the most, efficient ways to estimate agile teams. However, that does not mean that it makes everything easy for the teams. Utilizing planning poker in the most efficient manner becomes tricky for teams who are clueless or inconsistent with managing it. There is a lot to maintain and manage when using planning poker tools. Maintaining and storing team cards or purchasing the right cards are some of the tricky tasks that require consistent management. So, what could be the solution here?

The Solution!

Luckily, there are various online planning poker tools and apps that make using this technique effortless. These planning poker tools and apps allow every team member to add their two cents to the estimation process. However, the solution does not lie here; it lies in choosing the correct planning poker tool for your team. Keep reading to find the best one for you out of the following top 5 planning poker tools!

Top 5 Planning Poker Tools

1. Chpokify.com

Chpokify.com is an easy-to-use, efficient, and ideal planning poker tool on the market. A pleasant and modern space for your teammates is automatically available as soon as you register with Chpokify. The space has everything you and your team would need for creating and estimating stories. What makes the space pleasant is its customizability. Chpokify allows you to choose between dark and light modes with a simple click. Plus, Chpokify also allows you to create as many spaces as you want in one account.

The process of inviting people and teaming them up is incredibly smooth and effortless. All you have to do is invite people via an invitation link and that's it. Chpokify will automatically register and add them to the team. Moreover, controlling the whole field, or the voting process, taking notes, conducting revotes, or resetting the field is just a click away. Moreover, the final reports are assessed and presented in a detailed manner, which makes it easy to review the progress of each team member. Chpokify doesn’t lag or stutter, which makes it a highly praised planning poker tool on the market.

Chpokify is a completely free and open-source planning poker tool. This means that anyone can use the tool without any cost and even customize it to suit their specific needs https://github.com/vborodulin/chpokify

2. PlanningPoker.com

Standing second to Chpokify.com, this planning poker tool is trusted in various professions and industries. Some of its notable features include the ability to import stories and make every task as simple and effective as possible. The predefined options provided by this tool aid in efficiently creating and managing teams. The final score board presents the average points of each team. You can control the voting, monitor team velocity, and choose between a wide variety of cards. However, one major flaw in this planning poker tool is that it’s not free. No matter the size of the team, you’ll have to pay for it. However, you will be charged after a 14-day trial period, after which you can cancel your subscription.

3. Firepoker.io

This online planning poker tool is completely free and can be used without any registration. You can create a space and conduct estimations almost right away. Moreover, the estimation cards are provided in four different sizes, such as Fibonacci, T-shirt, Scrum, and Sequential in pre-defined formats. Inviting the team members to the space is rather easy. All you have to do is share the room link with them.

4. Planitpoker.com

A simple and efficient planning poker tool with 100% free features. Some notable features include; creating rooms for conducting estimation, entering user stories, skipping stories, and auto revealing votes upon completing the voting process, changing your vote. Moreover, it also supports various estimation methods, including the T-shirt, Scrum, Sequential, and Playing cards.

However, automatically importing user stories may be an issue as that feature is not provided. But, then again, it is a free online planning poker tool that does its basic job.

5. Scrumpoker.online

Scrumpoker.online is another top-of-the-game, easy-to-use, and completely free online planning poker tool. It comes with a simple user interface. It allows you to create spaces, and invite team members in a few seconds. You don't have to register, nor do you have to pay additional charges, and complete a basic estimation without lagging.

Conclusion:

Overall, the abovementioned planning poker tools will make conducting estimations a lot easier for your team. When comparing Chpokify.com with other planning poker tools, it won’t be wrong to say that it’s the complete package. It provides the most premium features at a great price and makes the whole process as engaging, efficient, and easy as possible.

Planning poker (Scrum Poker) is a technique used in agile software development to estimate the complexity and size of work items. It is used by product owners, developers, designers, and other team members to quickly evaluate the relative complexity of work items. It's a great way to assign work items from larger backlogs into sprints.

This article will explain what scrum poker estimation consists of, how to use this technique for project estimation, and how it can be helpful for software development projects.

Tips to efficiently use planning poker for software development estimation

In this technique of assessment, every estimator takes a set of poker cards. Those cards could consist of different numbers from 0 to 9 or 13. The company and the upper management must know how to efficiently use the scrum poker technique for software development project estimation.

Below are a few rules that must be followed to efficiently use the planning poker tools and software for agile software development estimation.

1. Read out all the tasks that the workers need to complete for software development. It could help every employee know what kind of work he has to do to complete the job. When the participants are not aware of the list and the complexities of a task, their estimate would not be accurate.

2. After reading the task, the project manager must brief everyone about the details of each task. It could help everyone learn about the project and the tasks that everyone has to complete in a time. The workers would have clarity about the projects, and they could give an accurate estimate.

3. In the next step, everyone picks a card representing his estimate for the task. Once everyone has chosen a card, they have to turn their cards over at the same time to avoid teammates influencing each other’s estimates.

4. When everyone picks a card, now is the time to ask everyone, especially those who have selected the lowest and the highest cards. They will have to give their opinion about the task and why they have chosen a particular card.

5. After listening to the views of everyone, the employees have to choose the cards once again.

6. Finally, now is the time to know if everyone is on the same page or not. If there is a consensus on the estimation, it is well and good. Otherwise, everyone has to give his opinion once again and go for re-estimation.

After learning about the usage of planning poker, now is the time to learn the benefits of this technique. So, here are a few benefits of using the scrum poker technique for project estimation.

Planning poker estimation activities are fun for everyone

Besides providing an accurate estimate, this practice can be included in a fun activity where everyone is included in a game. When they are together to discuss a project, they can have fun while chatting. This activity is suitable for both the employees and the project.

Everyone has an equal opportunity to give his opinion

Planning poker is a collaborative estimation technique in which participants use playing cards to represent the size of each task. This technique provides an equal opportunity for each team member to give their opinion about the project. Every member provides an opinion according to his skills and experience in the industry.

After the whole team has a consensus, no one could give any excuse if he is not matching the pace of the work.

Equal contribution to the estimation

In planning poker, everyone has an equal contribution to the estimation. The power is in the hands of everyone, and it helps to make sure that no one person dominates the conversation.

It is an efficient way of generating estimates. It reduces the time spent on estimating and generates better calculations due to a more democratic process.

Planning poker estimation encourages team ownership

Planning poker is a technique that encourages team ownership of a software development project by evenly distributing responsibility. In addition, it aims to build an open dialogue about the work and encourage participation by all stakeholders in the project.

Accurate and fast

The main advantage of this technique is that it's fast and accurate compared to other estimation methods as everyone in the team gives his opinion, and in the end, they provide the perfect estimate with no loopholes.

Better collaboration

Software developers have positively received planning Poker because it helps increase collaboration among team members by promoting discussions around the task and then getting consensus on the estimate.

Conclusion

Planning poker is helpful for everyone, especially for the software industry and web development industry. But for better usage of this technique, the workers need to know how to use this technique for project estimation efficiently.

Once everyone in the team has clarity of the project and its minor tasks, it could be easier for the whole team to give an accurate estimate for the software or web development project.

If the management and the employees don’t know how to get the benefits of this technique, they could give an inaccurate estimate, which could ruin the project and the company’s reputation. For this reason, it is essential for workers and management to learn the Scrum poker process and get the best tools from

Planning poker (also known as scrum poker) is a software package that helps facilitate the planning phase of a product development cycle.

This technique is used during the early stages of developing a product like software where designers, developers, and other stakeholders collaborate to estimate how much work it will take to produce the design or the whole project.

Moreover, it relies on consensus building with team members using the information, experience, and skills to develop the whole project estimation.

It’s named after "show of hands" poker games where players are asked for their opinion on the subject and raise their hand if they agree with the comment.

In this technique, one card is drawn at random from a deck. The person who drew the card then makes an estimation. Anyone who agrees with the given assessment raises his hand, and everyone keeps going around until someone disagrees with an estimate or there are no more cards left in the deck.

Planning Poker Rules and Tips to Get the Best Outcome from Each Meeting

Planning Poker is an agile technique designed to use if there is no agreement on a particular topic. It consists of each person showing their thumbs and then flipping them over so that the other players can see.

There are several steps you can take to make sure that your Planning Poker meeting goes smoothly. You should:

- Make sure that everyone has time to review the content and get up to speed before the meeting starts

- Make sure that you have plenty of time for discussion

- Encourage people in the group to add their opinion, even if they disagree

- Put your points in writing before the start of the meeting

What are the four types of cards used for estimating planning poker?

There are four types of cards that are used for estimating:

1. Large card - To represent user stories with many tasks or high complexity

2. Medium card - To represent user stories with few tasks or low complexity

3. Small card - To represent user stories with many tasks and high complexity

4. X-small card - To represent user stories with few tasks and low complexity

The Uses of Scrum Poker

Planning poker estimates the amount of work involved in completing a software task or project. It is a simple but effective way to determine the time and resources required for a project and helps teams agree on how to prioritize tasks.

Here are a few key advantages that a company can get by using this technique.

1. This is an efficient technique because it removes some of the pressure from developers. They don’t have to estimate everything by themselves, and they can share responsibility with their teammates.
2. It also encourages team members to speak up if they disagree with an estimate, which can help the team better understand how much work they have left to do and their priorities as well.
3. To implement this technique for work, no one needs any kind of special training or skills. That is how everyone can easily participate in the discussion, whether he is an expert in the field or not.
4. The advantages of this technique are that it encourages participation, provides an opportunity for collaboration and knowledge sharing, and is easy to do because all you need is a deck of cards.
5. The planning poker technique also promotes collaboration because team members can pool their skills and knowledge together when estimating tasks using this method and share their thoughts.
6. The poker tool helps the workers feel that they have contributed to the plan. When the workers realize that they have participated in creating the project, they try harder for its success than when they are told what to do. When they put extra effort into completing a project, it becomes easier for them to finish the whole project in the least time possible.

Drawbacks of planning poker

1. Not any system is perfect in its unmodified form. This poker tool also has its pitfalls. The consensus may still lack crucial information, leading people to rely too heavily on a flawed plan since the start of the discussion.
2. Second, the poker tool relies on a democratic process to be accurate & representative of the whole cohort. It is possible, however, for an aggressive and dominating person to seize control of the process. This may lead to an inaccurate count or a skewed estimate.

Conclusion

This is one of the best techniques used for estimating the size of work efforts in software development and other projects to come up with an accurate estimate and reduce the risk of human bias from individual estimators.

Although this is one of the most effective techniques for project estimation still, it has a few drawbacks that could ruin the whole analysis. Therefore, the upper management must have to control the entire process of planning poker to get an accurate estimate. Chpokify has developed the best tools that can help you learn planning poker and get accurate estimations for any kind of project.

Hello, and thank you for visiting our Chpokify Planning Poker Online. Everyone is welcome to use this software for free. Invite your team to meet you as a scrum master by starting a named session.

The scrum master view should be displayed on a big screen, and everyone else should interact via smartphones. Simply enter the id given in the scrum master view's heading or scan the QR-Code to join a session.

What is Planning Poker Online, and how does it work?

Scrum poker online is an open-source web application of planning poker for scrum teams to assess story complexities.

This technique, also known as planning poker, is a general agreement, a game-based technique for estimating the complexity and labor necessary to produce a software product.

Following the presentation of the feature, each team member casts a vote from each of the available card sets.

The vote is kept secret until all members cast their votes to avoid misled other team members. After that, each person's vote must be explained, and the process is repeated until everyone agrees on a final value.

In what ways can you make story estimations more accurate?

Start your own poker session. In planning poker online, you may interact and estimate using an online tool.

It's no secret that planning poker sessions can be challenging for anyone who has worked with Scrum, SAFE, or any other agile methodology that relies on story-point estimations to determine the complexity of an application's features. But at the same time, everyone is painfully aware of the importance of a good planning session for two reasons: first, to ensure that everyone on the agile team agrees with acceptance criteria, description of sorted, and overall scope, and second, so the product owner can make an informed decision when prioritizing the backlog.

Why is scrum poker so popular? What is a well-prepared user story, how do you convey it, and how do you deal with inconsistencies between estimates? We'll explore these topics and more to help you grasp the recipe for successful planning.

Before estimating, make sure the user story is "ready."

The feature or user story that we want to estimate must be available to have a successful estimation session. So how do we write a story? In Scrum, this usually happens during refinement sessions, where the product owner and developers (sometimes aided by a scrum master) review the story's contents.

As a team, we start with the product owner summarizing the user's desired functionality. This second section is vital because it should explain why what we're doing matters.

The most common user story structure is? As a product owner frequently write high-level acceptance criteria that are discussed with the development team. Contrary to popular belief, good acceptance criteria are strong conditions that satisfy the client and fulfill the value defined.

The scrum team reviews the acceptance criteria and decides whether to add or remove any or explain aspects that are obviously out of scope.

Using the Scrum Poker online, we can estimate once everyone agrees on the acceptance criteria and defines (also called Planning Poker).

Using Planning poker to estimate

This is when the estimation tool on planning poker online comes in handy. We recommend starting the session at the refinement or planning session and having all scrum team members enter the room using the room ID provided. Once the user story has been addressed and all questions have been answered, the development team members begin measuring the story's complexity by assigning story points to it. Okay, you make story points and complexity sound simple... But what precisely are story points, and how do I know how many stories point a story should have?

Storylines

In Scrum, story points represent the difficulty of implementing a user story. This "complexity" is related to effort but also the risk and anticipated obstacles. The metric is abstract because it cannot be quantified in terms of days or hours.

Fibonacci is used to determining the length of the estimate tale. It also helps to have a reference user story that everyone in the scrum team understands and can estimate.

It is, therefore, possible to estimate different user stories using the reference user tale. The reference user story has three points, so a tale with only one point should be three times less difficult.

As a result, the stories' absolute value is less essential than their relationship. Keep in mind that the more stories the team estimates, the better they have it here.

Finding the outcomes

After everyone has submitted their estimates, the product owner or scrum master displays the results, and if they all match, the story has been estimated effectively. On the other hand, if there are some differences, the far of each other members can begin debating why their estimates differ.

This implies that there isn't a shared grasp of everything that this story contains most of the time. This conversation may result in a rethinking of the acceptance criteria, which is quite acceptable; after all, this is an ongoing process.

Okay, I now have a better estimate, but why does it matter?

A well-estimated story substantially assists the product owner in determining whether the value of a user story (or new functionality) is justified by the complexity and time required to achieve it.

It also allows for a better understanding of scrum poker online: after the first sprint, the team will know exactly how many story points they could achieve; thus, the next sprint should be packed with a similar number of story points.

As the team develops knowledge and becomes more efficient, the delivery of a certain number of story points may be accomplished more quickly than previously.

However, this is the second phase – for the time being, start estimating throughout your planned poker game with planning poker online. I appreciate the pleasure of attempting to reach an agreement on an estimate... As you will see, it works wonderfully to create a shared understanding of what is required.

Estimating the cost of performing an operation or a function is, without a doubt, one of the most complex tasks in project management. It requires the confrontation and collaboration of technical and functional experts, notably depending on the experience of the personnel involved in the estimation and their understanding of the client and its technical environment. The Scrum agile method provides an effective tool for the development team to estimate the workload: Scrum Poker.

Principles of Scrum Poker

The Scrum Poker will gather a project team around the Scrum Master, who will promote various exchanges between the participants around the studied function. The interest of Scrum Poker is that everyone can freely express what they think is appropriate so that they can cross-reference different sources of information and different opinions. Everyone can contribute, based on their experience, expertise, and feelings. Providing a wide range of information and taking it into account will only merge the estimates that will be made, as the full complexity of the function requested will be highlighted and known to all.

The technical experts can bring several points of view and several solutions to the realization of a function. The function experts will encourage the participants to evaluate the key points or shadows that may be considered in the function's realization.

The workload estimate will be linked to a set of features that exist in the product backlog and will be identified by the product owner as a priority and included in the next sprint. Therefore, plan poker before the sprint starts to determine the cost of each feature and the actual cost that can be achieved. Note, however, that it is by no means a question of planning the achievements of the upcoming sprint in order to determine a schedule, but only to get an estimate of each function defined as a priority.

Described in this way, the planning poker is like any project meeting to estimate the workload. The advantage of the Scrum agile method is that it brings an interesting twist to the estimation process.

The value on the card does not represent the load in terms of man-days, so it does not directly represent the duration of the completion. These values are the point where the duration of the task is taken into consideration, but the most important thing is its complexity and also related to the other requested functions. These are just a few points.
A value of 0 means that a function is already in place or that no special effort is required. Values of 0.5 and 1 can be used for particularly simple tasks, and 3 and 5 are used for somewhat more complex tasks. In addition, implementation requires more substantial or complex work.
A value of 100 means very complicated and a lot of work time. It may be necessary to divide features that receive this score into smaller batches, which can be spread over several consecutive sprints.
A card with the symbol "∞" (infinity) represents any task with a value greater than 100, so it is a particularly long or complex task that needs attention. Features that receive this score rarely have a chance of being included in the next sprint.

Progress of the Scrum Poker project

It is important to plan the poker well so that all stakeholders can sit quietly around a table without being disturbed long enough.

At the beginning of the meeting, each participant will receive a pack of special cards for scrum planning. Then, each participant can take turns using one of their cards to give their estimates while studying a feature.

When everyone is ready, the scrum master starts going through all the features that need to be evaluated. Then he brings them in one by one to study them in detail. For each feature on the list, the scrum master will read its description out loud. A discussion follows, during which everyone can ask questions to get more detailed information about the request and the solution being considered. The aim is to allow everyone to express themselves freely and to remove any ambiguities that may exist in the request.

Once everyone has a clear understanding of the function being discussed, each person chooses the card from their deck that best matches their estimation of the complexity and difficulty of its implementation. Then place the card face down on the table so as not to interfere with participants who have not yet made up their minds and choices. When everyone has spoken and finally puts the card of their choice on the table, it is time to check the results. All cards are turned over at the same time.

If the estimates are close enough, then everyone can easily agree.

However, if you can see that there is a big difference between the estimated values, choose the people or those with extreme values, i.e, the highest and lowest values, to express yourself. This way, each person can explain to the others the reasons for his or her choice and possibly persuade his or her employees. Repeat this process for participants who choose extreme values until everyone can explain their point of view.

When all points are presented and understood, everyone has the opportunity to change their assessment and choose a different card.

The scrum master scores the feature evaluation, then moves on to the next one until the entire list has been addressed.

Advantages of Scrum Plan Poker

Everyone can express themselves freely and bring their own life, experiences, and opinions. In estimation, no one is more important than another. The authors with the highest and lowest scores can explain their choice. Freedom of expression is what makes the final estimate very reliable. There can be several solutions, and finally, the one with the most votes is selected.

Moreover, it is the technical team that estimates what they should do. Therefore, they are very interested in being rigorous and not making mistakes. No external constraint (commercial, cost, etc.) can affect the estimate of achievement.

Planning poker is one tool used in agile. The reason it is useful is that it can help the team decide how many points to assign to a particular story or task. This helps facilitate endless discussions.

The method described below shows you how to use Planning Poker to make estimates. However, it is important to understand that each team differs slightly from the other. You can try to adjust the rules and processes to find the solution that works best for your team.

How does planning poker work?

When your team plays Planning Poker, you rely on the expertise of the team members involved, who can provide personal opinions on user stories.

This technique can help the team get closer to the workload or complexity of the task and ensure that everyone agrees.
If someone in the group chooses a different card, then sometimes, it definitely needed a debate or even an argument until the team reaches a consensus on its implementation.

The prerequisites:

To play Planning Poker, you must meet the following requirements:

• The Scrum team must understand how Planning Poker works
• A group of developers must agree in advance with the story described by the product owner
• Plan a poker game
• If they estimate the workload or relative complexity, the team must agree
• Understand what the agreed-upon basic story is and how many points are scored
• In the case of surveys or shared discussions, the Product Owner can be contacted

How to play:

Hand out cards:
Make sure each team member has a set of cards.

These cards usually have numerical values, and their meanings are:
0: A value of zero means that the story can be completed performing no operations. It is mainly used when the deployment is suspended.

0.5: Not zero, but almost a piece of cake that blind people can do.

1: This is a short story with no complexity or effort.
2: Double the meaning of 1.

3: A little more than 2.
5: This is an interesting card. It takes brains and effort to make this story happen. Widely used when the story gets serious.

8: Much more than 5, but still controllable.
13: This number shows that the user's story is on the cutting edge, becoming too complicated to be considered a single story. Consider splitting the story.

20: This card primarily expresses some desperation by team members. As a team, you should consider splitting the story.

40: To a large extent, these cards simply express the desperation of the team members. As a team, you should consider splitting the story.
100: To a large extent, these cards simply express some desperation by the team members. As a team, you should consider splitting the story.

?: A question mark card appears, and the developer does not know how to estimate the story.

☕️: Planning a sprint can be exhausting. This card shows that the team member is asking for an abrupt break.

Agree to refer to the story:

Especially when you are playing Planning Poker for the first time. It helps to remember the story or task the team recently completed and agrees on the value.

This story will be used as a reference story for the estimate.

Be sure not to choose a story that is too small or too large, as this baseline story should last longer than the next sprint in order to achieve a meaningful burn-down graph and velocity throughout the project.

You can also ignore the definition of a story and rely entirely on the intuition of your team. The effect is better than at first glance.

Story by story:

Now the team can open the first user story, preferably on a big screen or on a sticker that everyone can see.

Next, make sure that everyone understands what needs to be done in this user story. This step is very important and each team member should use a small sign (like "thumbs up") to confirm.

Next, ask the team the second question, if everyone knows how to handle this story. (Don't talk much or argue at this point, unless at least one developer is struggling to find a solution or is unsure)

Estimates:

Now, everyone on the development team (whether it's the product owner or the Scrum Master) silently picks a card that is not visible to other team members.

When everyone has prepared the card, you turn it over and show it to the team at the same time.
The following results are then possible:

...When everyone chooses the same card:
Enter the agreed story point in the story and move on to the next story.

...When different card values are displayed (? or "coffee break")
This is the interesting part. Now it's time for the debate. Never really skip this part, just pick an average...

The basis for preparing the debate:

• Choose the most qualified person with the fewest numbers
• Select the most qualified person with the most numbers
• The team selects only 2 people, even if the highest or lowest number has been displayed several times

Now the developers with higher numbers explain the idea behind the selected card. No discussion is allowed at this point.

Later, the developers representing the lowest value explained the ideas behind their choices.

The entire group understands each other's ideas and can silently compare them with their own.

Without further discussion, move on to the next round of estimation. Affected by the initial explanation, everyone can change their minds, choose another card, and then go back to the previous round.

Continue this iteration until everyone agrees on the same number.

...When a "?" is displayed

Let that person express his or her concerns. And try to clarify it.

...When the "coffee break" card is displayed

As a team, decide if and when to take a coffee break.

Whatever the team decides, consider that one of your teammates is tired and is happy to take a break to refocus their attention.

What to do and what not to do:

• Don't work with margins:

Inexperienced or unsteady teams slack off on the task to compensate for the uncertainty of this or other stories by estimating a higher number than necessary.

Never do this! It is normal to make bad guesses from time to time. You should also consider that you can create other stories with less complexity than you previously thought.

The goal behind the story point is to achieve a reliable and consistent speed. Don't collect points.

• Don't compare with other teams:

Estimates and story points cannot be compared with other teams. Each team agrees with their own reference story and may use a different range of cards.

• Post-Sprint Reflection:

In order to continually improve your accuracy and reliability, please consider reviewing your most underestimated or overestimated stories. And make adjustments in the next plan.

• Accept teammate error:

Not everyone is an expert in every area. Establish a culture of respect for discussion while valuing and debating.

It's the worst thing ever when someone doesn't have the heart to give their opinion. You risk blocking important input in the future.

• Involve elementary students in the debate:

Create some diversity when electing debaters. Give junior developers a voice in understanding what is important to them and their progress in personal development.

Where you can help fill in gaps in knowledge about a particular story, help them by suggesting pair programming sessions. In terms of continuous improvement of team skills, this is a free lunch.

• Stop when you feel there are enough achievable points in the sprint:

Calculate your forecast speed before you start estimating. That way, you can stop after a reasonable amount of time or send a signal to your product manager to provide more stories when it's significantly lower.

In order to prepare for a balanced sprint backlog, it is recommended that PO be the passive member of the room when you play Planning Poker. This way, the Product Owner can intuitively understand which stories are involved and which are not.

Preparing for the backlog sprint during the next sprint is a handy technique for providing a more accurate number of backlog items. Backlog improvements can only be done by a part of the team or by a single mature developer of the product owner.

• Do not change the estimate during the sprint:

Whether the story point estimate is incorrect when you process the story, never change your mind during the sprint.

Instead, write it down and present it in the next retrospective so the team can learn and improve.

Many agile teams utilize affinity estimation to estimate a large number of user stories in narrative points fast and simply. This is a good method to use if a project is just getting started and the backlog hasn't been estimated yet, or if you're getting ready to schedule a release.

Many agile teams utilize affinity estimation to rapidly and simply estimate a large number of user stories in narrative points. Other estimating techniques, such as Planning Poker or the Bucket System, are useful for reaching a consensus in small projects. If a project is just getting started and the backlog hasn't been estimated yet, or if you're getting ready to schedule releases, Affinity Estimation is a fantastic approach to use. When the team is small and the number of participants is small, this method is beneficial.

Affinity estimation vs Planning poker. What's the difference

Planning Poker is a consensus-based agile estimating and planning approach. The product owner or client reads an agile user story or explains a feature to the estimators to begin a poker planning session.

Each estimator has a deck of Planning Poker cards with values such as 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, and 100, which is the recommended sequence. The numbers reflect the estimated amount of narrative points, ideal days, or other units by the team.

The estimators talk about the functionality and ask the product owner questions as required. After the feature has been thoroughly explained, each estimator chooses a card to represent his or her estimate in private. After then, all of the cards are revealed at the same time.

The estimate is established if all estimators chose the same value. If this is not the case, the estimators will debate their estimations. The reasons for the high and low estimates should be shared in particular. Each estimator reselects an estimate card after more debate, and all cards are shown at the same moment.

The poker planning procedure is continued until the estimators reach an agreement or until the estimators determine that agile estimating and planning of a specific item should be postponed until further information is available.

Affinity estimate with agility has the following characteristics:

Simple and quick

Make your decision as transparent and visible as possible.

Make the estimating session a joyful and collaborative experience rather than a contentious process.

Agile affinity estimate participants include:

A project's Product Owner

A flexible delivery team

Facilitation by a Scrum Master

The following are some of the stages involved in estimating affinity:

Relative Sizing in the Dark:

The agile team discreetly sets the relative sizes of the user stories once the product owner presents them to the team. On a horizontal scale, the team organizes the tales in increasing order. It can also be done by rearranging notes or indexes until everyone on the team is happy with the arrangement. To keep the procedure fast and non-confrontational, this phase is done "silently," as in mute-mapping.

Making changes to the wall:

The members of the team adjust the relative sizes on the wall. This phase entails conversations between the product owner and the team, with the latter having the opportunity to rearrange the order determined in the previous step depending on their discussion and conclusion.

Sorting things into buckets based on their respective sizes:

The objects are organized into distinct "buckets" that are labeled according to the chosen estimate scale. The buckets may be labeled Extra Small, Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large, or they could be labeled using a non-linear scale with narrative point values of 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, and 13.

The product owner's dilemma:

In this phase, the product owner may consult with the team on the sizing. If the team decides to modify the size of a story, they must first remove it from the wall before repositioning it according to the new size they arrived at after consulting with the product owner.

Planning poker is an agile estimating approach that employs narrative points to assess the task's difficulty. The narrative point values that may be allocated based on the Fibonacci sequence are 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, and 100. For the entire project, each of them represents a distinct level of complexity.

The planning poker session begins with all of the team members participating in the estimating process sitting together. Each participant has a deck of cards with the above-mentioned narrative point values. The next phase is for a leader figure or the client to read out the "user story" (basically the project) and detail all of the criteria and features.

The stakeholder who reads the narrative will have a conversation with the team members who are estimating, who will then have a conversation with each other. They can now ask the consumer or the owner clarifying questions and convey any reservations they may have.

After the talks, each estimator will choose a card with the narrative point they feel should be assigned to the project. The final estimate will be based on the narrative point estimates matching up. If they don't match, the estimators who supplied the lowest and highest scores can explain why, and additional debate will occur until an agreement is reached.

This method is ineffective for big groups or when there are a high number of things to estimate. This is a fantastic method to utilize if you just have a limited amount of things (between 2 and 10) and a small group of teammates. It's also one of the most often used estimate methods.

A story point is an abstract measure of effort necessary to accomplish a user narrative used in agile project management and development to assess the complexity of completing it. In basic words, a narrative point is a number that informs the team of the tale's difficulty level. The difficulty may be defined as the amount of complexity, dangers, and work required.

At product backlog grooming sessions, story points, a type of relative estimating, is generally conducted, and the product backlog is assessed by the team in charge of the actual development and testing work.

The team does not estimate the precise time needed to develop the feature while estimating narrative points. Instead, they assess the task's complexity. The Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8,...) is commonly employed for this purpose. At initially, everyone on the team can evaluate the work based on their intuition and first impressions. If the disparities are considerable, the team members with the highest and lowest scores must explain their results to the rest of the team. The highest score is taken into consideration after the second round of estimates.

I'll use the same example as before:

PM: This button needs to be added to the main page. Are you prepared to make an estimate? Let's get started. 3, 2, 1... let's go!
PM: All right, we've got three, five, two, and eight. John, What made you give it an eight?
John: It must be added to numerous screens, among other things.
PM: Paul, why are there just two of you?
Paul: After all, it's just a button, and we have plenty of those in the app.
PM: All right, one more time. 1, 2, 3... Go!
PM: All right, three, two, and three. So, the score is a three.

A task point is similar to a story point. All of the teams I spoke with (or spoke with later) wanted to utilize a more granular unit than their narrative points.

A team that completed 10 narrative points every sprint, for example, may complete 80 task points per sprint.

Teams just desired a smaller, more granular unit to keep track of progress. It'd be like a speedometer in a car reporting speed in light years per hour. That would make it difficult for me to tell whether I'm going too fast.

For many teams, introducing a more granular unit was a smart idea. After all, it's difficult to track daily progress using story points for a team that, say, completes seven story points in two weeks. Many story elements are simply too vast to be helpful in this context.

Why not use Task Points instead?

As a result, task points have no clear benefit over hours. Task points, on the other hand, have all of the disadvantages of narrative points:

Many team members are unfamiliar with the notion.
The requirement for establishing baseline values against which relative estimating can be performed The fact that estimations drift with time in contrast to their original relative values is a source of worry.

Individuals with varying talents, experience levels, and backgrounds can agree on a relative estimate for work using story points.

Let's pretend that an octopus and I are both estimating the work required to wash my automobile.

The octopus has four times my number of arms. So the octopus can supposedly wash my car four times faster than I can. (I warned you it was a ridiculous example.) Consider that for a moment.)

However, the octopus will wash any automobile four times faster than I can. So, the octopus and I can agree that my two-seat automobile is worth five narrative points, while a larger car is worth ten.

So, even though the octopus is probably much faster at washing cars than I am, narrative points allow the octopus and I to agree on a lot of story points.

A lot of people have queries regarding Agile Story Points.
It may take some time to become used to using Story Points, but once you do, they may save you a lot of time in your operations. Here's a brief Q&A regarding Story Points to assist you to work through any difficulties you might have.

Is it possible to substitute hours for Story Points?

If you want to estimate in hours, you don't have to utilize Story Points while conducting your Agile project. What you should not do, however, is compare Story Points to their equivalence in hours (e.g., 13 Story Points should not equal 13 hours simply because the numbers are the same). The aim of utilizing Story Points to ease the estimate process is defeated.

Is it possible to change Story Points during Sprints?

No, even if you discover during the Sprint that the original estimations were inaccurate, your allotted story points should remain the same. The sprint review or sprint retrospective is the best opportunity to handle these modifications since this is when you can explain why particular activities required more or less work than expected and keep this information in mind for future planning.

Should I re-estimate the Story Points for a job that has been pushed to the following Sprint?

It's preferable not to change the estimated Story Points associated with a task once you've started it, even if you're transferring it to the following Sprint. It may be tempting to increase the Story Point estimate if you performed half the work in the time given, but it's preferable to discuss this during the Retrospective. You could discover that a work like this should be split into two halves, allocated to two distinct teams, or planned differently next time. Apply what you've learned to future tasks rather than adjusting the Story Points on existing assignments.

Product management can be tricky but, thanks to our golden tidbits, you’ll be able to master the game in no time. The process of strategically driving the creation, market launch, and ongoing maintenance and enhancement of a company's goods is known as product management.

Golden Product Management Advice

Get To Know Your Entire Team

Building relationships with your team is the secret ingredient behind effective product management. The conversations you have with your coworkers and your team allow you to ask questions, hear gripes, and analyze what's working and what isn't. Even though there will be a lot of meetings, take advantage of coffee breaks, meals, and walks around the block to get to know everyone.

Educate Yourself On The Process

You should be able to build your reputation in any organization if you are familiar with your product. People should be drawn to you by instinct. Others will be more eager to assist you in the future if you help others handle difficulties and answer product inquiries from within the organization. As a result of this, what It is important to be familiar with the product's business rules in addition to its features. As the product grows, the number of business rules increases dramatically. As a result, product managers should make an effort to maintain a product and business rules document that can be used to define what the product is and how it functions.

Create A Roadmap and Keep Revising It

Then, you'll have an executive-level roadmap that outlines how to achieve product and commercial goals with limited resources. Make use of it as a guide and as a tool for internal sales. While learning from consumers, your support team, and your sales staff, and reacting to external competitors' actions, you'll be more focused on the end goal.

Survey The Field Yourself

First and foremost, you must choose how you will fit into your new corporate environment. In some organizations, the product team has a significant amount of clout. Product managers are in charge of their product's resource allocation, marketing activities, and other aspects. They play a considerably more limited function for other businesses. You must determine how your company perceives your work and how much leeway you have to extend or shrink your responsibilities as needed. Second, you should research your competitors as well as the rest of the market. You could be overly enthusiastic right away and want to entirely redesign your product or add new features.

Listen To Your Customers And Other Performance Indicators

Most companies will give a set of indicators for product managers to utilize, but indications for non-profitable goods or services are sometimes neglected. Make your own set of weights and measures! The performance of these items must still be measured. In general, however, the key figures should either support the product strategy or prompt product managers to change any scheduled activities in order to achieve the required objectives.

Use a Scrum Poker - Planning Poker Tool

Planning poker is the estimation of the effort and time required to develop and manage a project regarding a product.  What makes it interesting is that this technique is presented as a game of poker. Each member of the agile team is assigned cards that aid in estimating points for each pending task. These planning poker or scrum poker tools were invented to help enterprises conduct accurate estimations and maintain consensus among the team. Choosing the right planning poker tool is essential as it decides the efficiency and accuracy of your estimation and product management. Chpokify.com is a planning poker tool that makes the above mentioned tips and tricks easier by allowing you to accomplish them in one place.

If you have a Chpokify account, you may create an infinite number of team members by sending them an invitation link. A single click allows you to handle the entire field or the voting process. You can also take notes, revote, or reset the field with ease. Because of this, it is possible to analyze the progress of any member of the team of up to ten people who can use the tool for free.

Conclusion

Product management is the process of strategically driving the creation, market launch, and ongoing maintenance and enhancement of a company's goods. Product managers are in charge of their product's resource allocation, marketing activities, and other aspects. In some organizations, the product team has a significant amount of clout. Choosing the right planning poker tool is essential as it decides the efficiency and accuracy of your estimation and product management. Chpokify.com allows you to analyze the progress of any member of a team of up to five people who can use the tool for free.

There are different techniques in the world of agile management of projects. One most usual method is Online Planning Poker, also known as Scrum Poker.

There are benefits and drawbacks to Planning Poker online. One of the greatest advantages is that each team member can tell their estimates which kind of encourages discussion and collaboration between people. It also makes the team members feel more committed to the plan of the project.

Benefits of Scrum Poker

Different Projects have their own good reasons to use this tool but here are the benefits observed by us in general:

Keeps everyone occupied

The best part of this estimation technique is that everyone needs to have their own reasons to explain why their estimation is correct. Every player needs to think about all the aspects of the testing efforts to prove their estimate is correct.

Team Ownership

As the entire team discussed properly and decided on an estimate for a story, they take the responsibility to complete that work within the efforts estimated. This approach makes the team own their project and keeps them involved from the start.

Fast and Accurate

When the entire team with different roles is available for the estimation, you can get an accurate estimation quickly. Accuracy in estimation saves up a lot of time and surprises in achieving your goals in every specific project.

Loop of Feedback

When players reveal their estimates, they have to discuss why their estimates are high or low. This discussion can get down to questions on the implementation and requirement, which is a nice feedback loop to decrease the conversation gaps.

Fun and Productive

Who wouldn’t want to play poker at work? When you combine work and play, it makes people get involved more and gives the best results.

New Ideas

With the entire team available in the room, you can expect different estimates from people based on their idea for solutions. Out-of-the-box thinkers can provide you with a better solution at the lowest estimates.

Relative

One of the best benefits of planning poker is that it helps you estimate tasks relative to one another. You may not want to know the accurate time length of every project but it should always be convenient to estimate whether it would take more or less effort than a task similar to it that you have already done before and know the amount of time it took.

Think of it as it doesn’t really matter if you check the length of your desk in meter scale in every unit or even in post-it notes and pencils, so long as each person on your team will be using the same scale.

We also take notes of how many people we reach out to will be working on the project. So if we think the project will take two hours with six developers then we’d score it as a three. Also, we need to build quality testing time into our estimates as well.

Everyone has their own Voice

The planning poker technique encourages every player not to accept each other’s opinions, instead, everyone has to make and present their own estimations. New workers in the team can learn a variety of aspects of the specific project very easily and fast during these poker sessions.

Keeps everyone engaged

Planning Poker is a great engaging activity where every member has to contribute actively by giving their inputs and answering the questions.

Improves communication

Quiet people or introverts get equal say during these sessions to speak which helps them to open up. Quiet people may have better ideas and when they present their estimate, they get the entire attention of the team to talk about their point of view.

Common Understanding

As the entire team is involved in the process of estimation, every team member has a deep understanding of the expectations of user stories. Even though stories are chosen by different team members, the rest of them have a good understanding of what everyone else is doing. This is beneficial to come up with a better solution.

Better Collaboration

Planning poker sessions gathers everyone and makes people interact with each other and in a sense works as a team-building activity as well. When people know each other, they can collaborate easily to achieve their required goals.

How our application Chpokify helps with Planning Poker?

We at Chpokify have many opportunities for you. After you’re done signing up, we give you and your teammates a space for everything related to Planning Poker. You just have to create your stories and your estimates. If you want extra space for new projects, we at Chpokify provide you with that as well.

Conclusion

We have found planning poker to be really convenient for estimating the size of project tasks. It helps the whole team to know what work is coming up and have their voice on how complex or simple each task is.

It also allows you to chart the velocity of each team from sprint to sprint, which helps you with future planning as it gives you a better idea of how much work you are able to complete from sprint to sprint.

Planning poker (also called scrum poker) assists agile teams in estimating the amount of time and effort required to complete every initiative on one‘s product backlog.

What is a Scrum Master? The Role and Responsibilities

A Scrum Master is an agile development group facilitator. Scrum is a technique that enables a team to organize itself quickly and make changes according to agile principles. The Scrum Master facilitates the process of exchanging information.

Role and Responsibilities

As a component of the Scrum framework, the Scrum Master position was created. In most cases, the role has no real influence (also known as servant-leadership). The name was originally intended to denote someone who is knowledgeable about Scrum and can thus coach others.

The Scrum Master is also in charge of improving interactions between both the Scrum Team and the organization to maximize the Scrum team's productivity. Eventually, this same Scrum Master is in charge of organizing and facilitating team meetings such as Daily Scrum, planned events, sprint retrospectives, and so on.

Is Scrum Master involved in poker planning?

The Scrum Master will also be at a planning poker meeting. Scrum Master is a team facilitator and hence the Scrum Master is supposed to participate in all weekly meetings, and there is no exception to a Poker Planning session... The owner of the product describes every item to a team before estimating it.

Play Planning Poker in Scrum Team

User stories could be estimated better and more significantly. I'd want to explore Poker Planning today in Scrum.

Planning Poker

Poker Planning in Agility is a holistic way of demand forecasting.

How does planning poker works?

The project management team from Scrum Master, as well as the Scrum design team, sits together. The owner reviews the agile record of a progressive group, the estimator, and describes it.

The Scrum Master provides the planning card deck for estimators of card values such as 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, or 100(series Fibonacci) that is the order that we advise. These are all the number of stories, perfect moments, and even other units in which the team forecasts.

The product owner outlines the characteristics of the development team while asking user history questions. Once the development team answers all questions, the poker card is taken by the Scrum Master so each estimator selects secretly one card to symbolize their estimate.

The Scrum Master next invites all estimators to disclose simultaneously the picked cards. If not, scrum Master will organize a dialogue with the estimators, and each estimator will explain why the value has been placed.

The high low estimator must be justified, but then the Scrum Master finished the discussion and requested the development team again to select the card and place it if all cards are of the same value as the following narrative.

The Poker Planned process repeats until consensus is reached, or until the estimation methods opt to delay agile estimations and planning until new information is obtained.

Rules of the Planning Poker Game

1. People with responsibility for certain tasks will vote on them

Quite often, team members allow everyone to vote even if they don't know what they're doing.

1. Managers should not vote

The commitments of a leader are usually not time-consuming, so their votes are usually too low. It is therefore advisable to not vote but to allow them in one instance to have a veto and over group agreement.

If the case length has doubled abnormally, the manager can ask if the team has considered something that may not have increased its size. He or she might end up making these suggestions, but he or she has no power to direct this same team to reduce their size.

1. Picking the larger size or points during ties

If you have ties between two successive sizes or points, just select the larger size and proceed.

Keep in mind if you use the Fibonacci series to estimate back-to-back sizes of 5 and 8. There will be no one complaining because a tie requires time to resolve the higher numbers.

1. Don’t embark on a deep implementation discussion

Groups usually lead to specialized interests while discussing a user story. To some extent that is okay, but due to time constraints, it must be limited. It will be enough to talk for nearly one minute.

The longer the team spends thinking, the more difficult it is. A team is therefore encouraged to follow another much safer approach to a solution, allowing them to calculate the quantity much faster.

1. Use the ‘I need a break’ card

We shouldn't forget that although the squad plays hard, certain players might require a brief break. You can utilize the 'I need a break' card to catch the attention of everybody for the break.

1. Use timers to reduce discussion

As mentioned above, there must be one minute of debate so that timepieces can be used.

1. Picking the largest size on the third round

The third round of voting must be completed before you can proceed. If there is no consensus by the third round of voting, you must take the largest size and Team members are given plenty of time to complete their tasks when they choose the largest size possible. Members are less likely to complain about not having enough time to complete tasks whenever the actual work begins.

1. Let the Product Owner meet QA leads and Development leads ahead of time

To ensure all user history queries are addressed, the PO fulfills the Dev and QA guidelines before the Planning Poker Conference. Instead of engaging in information collection throughout the game session, the team might concentrate on size.

1. Don’t forget the baseline

Whatever a team adopts as a pattern, all iterations should be consistent. If a day is chosen as a size, it must also serve as a reference for other iterations. If a certain user story is length 1 or size 3, the iterations must remain constant.

How do you utilize Scrum for poker planning?

Poker planning (also called Scrum poker) lets agility teams calculate the time and energy needed to finish the product backlog for each initiative. The name of this gamified strategy is poker planning because people utilize physical cards.

Jira planning poker is a versatile toolset for estimating your backlog and getting it ready for refinement and planning. It determines the optimal scrum estimate techniques from each of the most common estimation approaches. Get the best experience at chpokify planning poker.

Estimation and story points

By using a reasonable estimate, product owners can maximize efficiency and impacts. That is why it is so important.

Estimation is a difficult task. It's one of the most challenging nature of the project for software engineers. A product owner's decision affects the entire team–and the business. Nobody should be amazed that everyone is concerned about the outcome, from developers to top management. That is a blunder. Agile estimation is nothing more than a wild guess. This isn't a sacrificial oath.

To make up for a missed deadline, it is not required to work on weekends.

Owner's input

To ensure that the product owner has a quick view of all features available and repairs, they keep track of the backlog, which is an orderly list of work.

However, product owners may not be aware of the implementation details. Great estimation may provide new insight into the level of effort required for each task, which can then be used to inform their assessment of each task's success factors.

It's also usual for product owners to reorder backlog items after getting development estimates.

Agile estimating is a collaborative effort.

Everyone on the team must participate (developers, designers, testers, deployers, etc.).

They each have their own viewpoint on the product and what it will take to complete a user narrative.

Development and quality assurance must weigh in when product management wishes to accomplish something very simple, such as support for a new web browser.

Changes to the design also require the involvement of the design team, as well as development and Quality Assurance departments. This results in quality estimates, reduced morale among key contributors, and inferior system functionality.

So, don't let estimates generated in a vacuum sway your staff. It's a sure lousy idea!

• Do you want to play around with narrative points? To get started, sign up or connect to Jira planning poker.
• Use this cooperative guide to set up your first scrum project.

Story points versus. hours

Days, weeks, and months are common time calculations used by traditional software teams to predict the length of a project. Many agile teams have switched to narrative points as a way to communicate their work. Story points are used to measure a project's backlog or overall effort.

This abstraction may appear counter-intuitive, but it is highly beneficial because it forces the team to make more complex decisions about the job's complexity.

The following are a few advantages of using story points:

• Emails, conferences, and meetings that a team member may be involved in are not included in the dates.
• Time has an emotional connection. Comparative estimation removes emotional attachment.
• Because each poker team estimates work on a larger scale, their speed will vary.
• It's easy to assign points once you've determined the proportional effort of each tale.
• Rather than time spent, team members get story points for solving problems. That way, team members aren't wasting time.

Planning poker and story points

An exercise like planning poker can help teams who are new to story points. Jira planning poker is a widely used procedure throughout the company.

After selecting an element from the backlog, the team will deliberate it briefly before mentally calculating an estimate. Everybody holds up his or her card when they've made the most accurate guesses.

• Consider giving it a trial and seeing what happens?
• Download the Planning Poker App on your device.
• Explore more about Planning Poker by visiting our website today.

Assume a high degree of probability. Take a deep breath and raise the level of conversation if the team is getting bogged down in the weeds.

Estimate smarter, not harder

There should never be a process that takes more than 16 hours to finish. For example, you may specify a maximum of 20 points for narrative points. Work items higher than this are simply too difficult to estimate with a high degree of certainty. The importance of this assurance is magnified for objects near the top of the list.

Estimate how long it will take to complete the next project on your list. Your application will very definitely have altered as a result of these changes once the team begins working on them.

Previous estimations will be less accurate as a result of this change. Planning projects that will most likely change is a waste of time. You shouldn't be scared to provide the product owner with a rough estimate so that she can utilize it to focus her product plan.

Take a cue from previous estimates

By looking back, the team may learn from past mistakes and improve their predictions. For example, Jira planning poker keeps track of store points, which makes realigning estimations much easier.

Think about retrieving the 5 stories that the team has provided previously with a storyline point value of 8.

Examine whether or not each of those tasks required a similar amount of effort. If not, why not? Be sure to keep this information in mind for future conversations about cost estimates.

Agile estimation is a skill just like everything else in agile development. Improve your skills with practice.