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Learn how to include Planning Poker cards to your daily work routine.

Why use it? 

Estimating is a team activity - every team member is usually involved in estimating every story. Why?

• At the time of planning, we normally don’t know exactly who will be implementing which parts of which stories.
  
• Stories normally involve several people and different types of expertise (user interface design, coding, testing, etc).
  
• In order to provide an estimate, a team member needs some kind of understanding of what the story is about. By asking everybody to estimate each item, we make sure that each team member understands what each item is about. This increases the likelihood that team members will help each other out during the sprint. It also increases the likelihood that questions about the story come up early.
  
• When asking everybody to estimate a story we often discover discrepancies where two different team members have wildly different estimates for the same story. That kind of stuff is better to discover and discuss earlier than later. If you ask the team to provide an estimate, normally the person who understands the story best will be the first one to blurt one out. Unfortunately, this will strongly affect everybody else’s estimates.

Each team member gets a deck of 13 cards as shown above. Whenever a story is to be estimated, each team member selects a card that represents his time estimate (in story points) and places it face-down on the table. When all team members are done the cards on the table are revealed simultaneously. That way each team member is forced to think for himself rather than lean on somebody else’s estimate.

If there is a large discrepancy between two estimates, the team discusses the differences and tries to build a common picture of what work is involved in the story. They might do some kind of task breakdown. Afterwards, the team estimates again. This loop is repeated until the time estimates converge, i.e. all estimates are approximately the same for that story.

This is to avoid a false sense of accuracy for large time estimates. If a story is estimated at approximately 20 story points, it is not relevant to discuss whether it should be 20 or 18 or 21. All we know is that it is a large story and that it is hard to estimate. So 20 is our ballpark guess. And no, you can’t cheat by combining a 5 and a 2 to make a 7. You have to choose either 5 or 8, there is no 7.