Planning Poker is a method for relative effort estimation in agile software development. As a rule, a workshop format is chosen for the implementation. Participants of the workshop are all members of the development team, the client and a neutral moderator. The prerequisite is that the task is completely described in the form of so-called user stories.
The result of the planning poker is the rating of all user stories with story points. A list will be created for the user stories that need to be defined more precisely. With the help of these evaluated user stories, further planning is then possible, e.g. in the form of sprint planning.
The method was first mentioned in 2002 by James W. Grenning. In the USA, the company Mountain Goat Software LLC has registered Planning Poker as a registered trademark and provides a free online tool for this method.
The use of the methods becomes difficult in the following cases:
– the number of participants is below five persons (group effect is omitted) or above eleven persons (the estimation becomes too complex),
– the participants have too little expertise. Then the estimate becomes speculative.
