Monday, December 30, 2013

Quick and Free, Remote-Team Planning Poker

Recently I was on a hybrid team, made up of representatives from Twin Technologies and 2 other companies. We were all over the country, and we needed a way to play planning poker effectively. Given the other tools that we were using, adding an additional tool, credentials, IT clearance, etc. wasn't feasible.

So we found this great blog post from fourkitchens about using a Google Spreadsheet for planning poker.


To play planning poker, we all call into the phone / voip conference number and open the google doc. After we discuss each story, everyone enters their story point vote, but doesn't press Enter right away. The scrum master can see that everyone has entered a value when their respective box is highlighted grey. Once everyone has made a choice, the scrum master calls “3, 2, 1: Go” and everyone hits Enter. All values appear on everyone’s screen and the planning poker game continues as normal.

We color coded the cells based on conditional formatting (Format -> conditional formatting). Each Fibonacci number got its own color. Invalid numbers remained white. This gave an easy visual representation on the distribution of values.

Now you might have noticed the "Average" line in the photo. We were spending too much time discussing and coming to a unanimous agreement on these estimates.  Based on recent recommendations in the Agile world, everyone doesn't have to agree on a number. The numbers do have to be within a spread of 3 though. For example, 2,3,5 or 3,5,8 are valid spreads. The spread has to be there present though: 2,5,5 or 3,3,8 are not valid spreads and would need to be discussed. (The photo above would represent a invalid spread and we'd have to have more discussion until we could bring that in).

With the adopted averaging the numbers, we would round up to get our estimated point value. Usually what would happen, is that as the team size would unfortunately fluctuate and /or different people could or couldn't attend the planning, we would change what was being averaged. The picture above shows the average only from Rick, Drew, and Larry, and the resulting estimate would be 2 story points (rounding up, or Math.ceil(1.333) :) ) .

Given this system of averaging, it is likely and common to end up with non-Fibonacci totals for our estimates. That is okay. Since the estimates have no time based correlation, they are only used to determine our velocity and therefore our commitment, using Fibonacci only numbers as the inputs and the average as the output works out really well. Fours, sixes, and sevens in out estimate gave us good insight into velocity.

Now just to repeat how agile estimates are supposed to work. The estimate is RELATIVELY sized based on team decided criteria. These UNIT-LESS numbers are used solely to determine velocity. It will likely take 2-3 sprints to even figure out what the velocity is. The estimate HAS NO CORRELATION to time. Once the velocity has been determined, then it is used to make the COMMITMENT. The team says, that we can do (x) story points per sprint, so we will commit and GUARANTEE that (x) will be done by the end of the sprint. That is why averaging works in this case, because the numbers roll into the commitment, and not into any time units.

This system is fast and simple. Adding or removing team members is a no-brainer. Estimating was no longer a chore, nor took up very much time. We could get in and out very quickly and get back to work. I hope that it works as well for you.

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