Planning Poker

There's a concept in the agile development world called Planning Poker that takes place during cost/schedule forecasting on agile projects. We typically prefer to use the word forecast versus estimate because we feel it better represents the uncertainty in the art of predicting software development outcomes. Planning Poker includes the customer and attempts to highlight the uncertainty in predictions while offering a meaningful forecast using a systematic approach with minimal (or just the right amount of) time spent.

In the purest form, a number of people including the customer sit in a room and follow specific rules actually using playing cards designed for agile project forecasting. We follow the same approach in our agile methodology, Perfect Vision. There's a lot more to the process but in essence, a customer selects a User Story (requested software feature) to forecast and the group discusses how the User Story should be implemented. After the discussion, each forecaster (developer) turns a card face down so no one else can see it. When everyone turns their card face up the typical range of forecasted points (each card has a point value) is discussed and defended and the process is repeated until an agreement is reached on the ultimate point value for the User Story. As the session continues, participants can also begin to triangulate by comparing already forecasted User Stories with User Stories yet to be forecasted to further validate forecasts. This is an efficient and valuable way to forecast the preliminary cost and schedule for software projects without spending months and thousands of dollars to create project artifacts that often do little more than support a guess.