Planning Poker
We played poker yesterday in our Sprint Planning meeting. Not Five Card Stud, or Texas Hold’em but Planning Poker.
Our previous planning efforts were okay — it was horrible at first but we got better at it. This time I wanted to do something different to not only see if we can get more exact, but to get people to relax a little and for everyone to have some sort of input into every task. I think it worked fine for the first 1.5 hours but the last 30 minutes we kinda ran out of gas.
The team members liked it — it was something different, we all got input in the decision. My manager didn’t seem to like it — “too much time with everyone here”. And it was true — two hour meeting with five developers is a man-day. Yet if we spend a man-day working on good estimation, it may save us days of work and anguish. As Jeff Atwood said, you are still playing poker with money, but it’s your employer’s money
Here are the cards I printed and handed out. Not sure if I’m ready to spend money on “real” Planning Poker cards yet. We’ll see how this sprint pans out.