Agile Planning Poker Using Salesforce and Heroku
[One may not expect to use Salesforce for Planning Poker sessions, but see how Aditya Naag’s planning-poker-salesforce repository can make this happen quite easily.]
Feature teams often employ the concept of Planning Poker (or Scrum Poker) to help estimate the effort required to complete a given user story. Each team member is provided a set of cards, which are used to provide their estimate for the level of effort required for a given story. Most teams employ decks that utilize a Fibonacci-like sequence of the following values: 0, ½, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100.
Experienced scrum masters make teams aware that an eight-point story should be able to be broken into a three-point and five-point story. As a result, stories are typically not worthwhile to estimate as anything greater than a value of eight.
It is helpful for feature teams to agree on a baseline story. That baseline story helps define what a given story value resembles. In my personal experience, a three-point effort is often used, since it falls in the middle of usable sequence range. The team can reference this baseline story, understand the effort required, and conclude that is the definition of the corresponding baseline value.
Over the years, I have referenced this gamified technique for story estimation in the Agile Zone at DZone. Two of my favorite articles are noted below:
