Planning Poker - Visualize the Numbers
Planning and estimation are communication processes, and Planning Poker is a popular facilitation tool (or should I say facilitation game). Many in the Agile community, including myself, prefer to estimate in Story Points from the row of numbers 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100 and infinity. One of the advantages is that this row covers a huge bandwidth of possible sizes and cope with the increasing uncertainty of large estimates.
However, I have observed a disadvantage. I have often seen teams jumping over two digit even if they just wanted to say “this Story is just slightly bigger than that one”. In such cases I have always had to intervene and explain that the number chosen meant “4 times bigger than” and not just “slightly bigger than”. My explanation for this behavior is that the estimation row was developed non-linearly. This is hard for people to conceptualize, as they extrapolate linearly. We can observe this pattern whenever we talk about the worldwide population explosion. Even though the underlying mechanism is well-known, we only understand the effect if we see explicit charts.
With this in mind, I asked myself how Planning Poker could be visually enhanced. The answer was to design Planning Poker Cards which display the numbers and their meanings distinctly. The numbers are illustrated as colored fourths in the background of each card. It is now easy to see what 2 or 4 times bigger means. The colors of the cards also have a meaning:
- Green: o.k. and ready for a Sprint.
- Orange: high risk, Story should be smaller. Story breakdown may take place during the next Planning/Estimation meeting.
- Red: Story is much to big or may be impossible. Additional joint effort is required to break this Story down into smaller pieces.
You can download a print master here. Feel free to use the cards in any way you wish, but please let me know how the cards are working for you and/or if you have any suggestions on how to improve them.
