Planning Poker Baseline
SAFe™ (The Scaled Agile Framework) uses Story Points throughout the various levels as its estimation currency. This is covered in the “Story” article on the SAFe site. This is a pretty standard practice in organizations scaling agile these days. If you dive a bit deeper into how this is done in SAFe you will see that actually the story points used in SAFe are quite similar to “Ideal Developer Day” as this helps the teams align to a common baseline and support a rational economic ROI discussion at the level of Features/Capabilities that require effort from more than one team or haven’t even been mapped to a specific team yet.
I then ask the team to take out their Planning Poker cards and the “S” card (or a “2” if the team is using Fibonacci). I’ll then count down from three and ask the team members (at the same time) to thrown down their “S” on the Story they feel is the smallest compared to all of the Stories on the table. A poker planning, or scrum poker session involves product owners or customers and editors. The session begins with each estimator holding a deck of value-based cards ranging in sequence. We recommend the following: 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40 and 100.
An alternative to using Story Points at the team level that is interesting to look at especially as Kanban is becoming a first-class citizen of the SAFe world is to use NoEstimates.
In essence this means not trying to estimate the size of the work just slice work into a size that we can bite on and turn around quickly. To get a quick grasp of it think of replacing your classic fibonacci planning poker cards with a set of cards saying 1, TFB (Too Frighteningly Big), NFC (No Faintest Clue). This approach is rising in popularity among Kanban/ScrumBan practitioners – We’ve been looking at the “Iteration Planning” process for years trying to address some of its wastes/tensions.
This “No Estimates” inspired approach to story estimation in PI Planning has a couple of benefits:
- It is faster – which comes in handy during PI Planning.
- It forces teams to slice into smaller stories which is better.
- It is naturally easier to baseline/align multiple teams around the same definition. (BTW a 1 here would be something like a 3 or 5 in the classic SAFe velocity calculation – a story that takes the team about 3 days to develop and 3 days to test)
Iteration Planning becomes even easier – Just understand your velocity and how many stories you can fit. Minimal time is spent estimating.
There are a couple of challenges though. Forcing the team to split their whole Feature into small 1-size stories including those that are only going to be pulled in later iterations in the PI might be a waste of time.
Another challenge is how to make rational economic decisions at the Feature/Capability and even Epic level without estimates. #NoEstimates die-hards say it doesn’t make sense to estimate even at this level, not just the stories level. I’m not convinced. What I typically do in cases where teams stop estimating story sizes is just use story counts as the currency at the higher levels. So instead of saying “This seems to be a 20 Story Points Feature” we would say “This Feature seems to be something around 20 stories” meaning we ESTIMATE it will map to about 20 stories when we eventually slice it. We DON’T slice it to stories in order to estimate. We reach that estimation using a classic relative estimate approach like Planning Poker / Team Estimation Game. This is actually something that helps with the first challenge as well. Knowing that we’re dealing with a Feature that we think has about 20 stories and that we identified 7 stories for the first iteration and 4 stories for the second , we might say something like there are around 9 stories more for the third iteration or even better – let’s look at the remaining chunk and compare that to our feature estimation scale and see how many stories we think there are there.
Of course, if we think there are dragons (a.k.a dependencies) hidden in this remaining chunk we should make the effort to slice it into smaller stories and work out the dependencies/scheduling with the other teams on the train.
I’ve done this with clients in the trenches. Based on this experience, I consider this alternative approach to estimation a legitimate alternative to Story Points estimation at the SAFe Team Level.
This blog post was originally posted on Yuval’s personal blog back in 2016.
Planning Poker Estimation Anti-Pattern
In the early days of agile estimation and planning, T-shirt sizes were used to schedule the poker to assess the relative size of a feature against a baseline. Though this is a very successful way to decouple time from the degree of effort of the features, this was not the most effective way of assigning user storey points. If we look at items like team velocity and product backlog and re-estimation, storey points are very critical.
In planning poker it’s very easy to tell the difference between a one and a two but how easy is it to tell the difference between let’s say an 8 and a 13?
As you may know, the way planning poker works is to get the entire team together. They are each given a set of poker cards to prepare and the facilitator will read the user ‘s storey and then everyone will keep their card without revealing their card to anyone else.
After the user story is read and everyone has a chance to think about it, everyone will show their cards. What is usually happening at this stage is that everybody is far apart. Poker planning is then used to facilitate a discussion about why people choose their level of effort.
It is normal if the team cannot agree very quickly, they’ll do a planning poker session again. What will happen after the second time people will usually be much closer together? However, If the team is farther apart or still very far apart, it might make sense to set the user storey aside and do a different user storey before you vote on it.
For example, one team member might have put down a 1/2 for this user story but another team member might have put down an 8 because they didn’t understand the user story itself.
When scrum squad does that means the team knows each other well and those storeys and the storey where scrum team was very far apart is an outlier and then scrum master would want to discuss it with the company or the product owner.
However, if scrum squad do further stories and those user stories are quite far apart the team is probably not understanding the exercise or not understanding the roles of voting. If this happens it may make sense to start again and have a facilitator explain the rules of planning poker and understand that team are voting on the entire effort it will take for that iteration, that means the design, the coding, all the architecture and testing of that particular feature. Many times it’s just a misunderstanding of the level of effort.
Also, it’s important to remember that planning poker is a tool to facilitate a safe discussion to build consensus.
Planning poker doesn’t necessarily solve the intimidation problem, but it mitigates it quite well. Poker planning also allows the team the chance to set their goals and often they won’t be able to meet in the centre because they’re too far away from their strengths. As you can see planning poker has its roots in negotiation theory and planning poker is a great facility to start estimating projects in and assign story points to user stories.
It’s not easy to poker planning if you’ve never done it before and sometimes it’s a little complicated the first time you ‘re poker planning.
Planning Poker Baseline Rules
Planning poker will not be the solution to your problems when you come to get a good estimate however planning poker will be used to facilitate the conversation and avoid the problem of the dominating personality. In conclusion, it’s important to remember that scrum squad are estimating the entire effort, not just the effort to code, not just the effort to test, not just the effort to design or architect the particular user story so that’s why some times planning poker takes a few rounds for the team to get used to what the level effort will be. In general, the Scrum team are only going to do planning poker for two maybe three rounds and then they need to start think.
Planning Poker Baseline Meaning
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Planning Poker Baseline Template
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