Poker players make many common mistakes, which limit their ability to win such as not taking position strategy tips seriously, forgetting about stack size of your opponents, and forgetting table image.
Planning poker is an agile estimation method where teams use numbered cards to calculate work effort for user stories or tasks, but teams sometimes have problems with this technique.
In the absence of user stories or tasks.
Estimation and planning are often a team struggle. They don’t understand the importance of user stories/tasks and define user stories/tasks or they don’t know how to estimate the size of stories and estimates are incorrect.
Determining scope and complexity for each story is key to avoiding “size creep,” where team estimates balloon over time.
James Grenning invented the agile estimation and planning technique planning poker in 2002 to help with distorted, ego-based estimation sessions. With this estimation technique, teams can instead talk about what it will take to create value for customers.
Plan poker in a way that everyone enjoys playing, such as a tale-sized variant, or an off-hand timer or offering small rewards for all hand makers. To do this successfully.
Not re-evaluating and changing estimates in the long run.
Key to good planning poker is making everyone in a team feel involved and appreciated when it is being implemented, because that will generate diverse views and more accurate, more complete estimates.
This means understanding all of the requirements and complexity of each user story or task before launching a planning poker session. A product owner should provide clear user stories with acceptance criteria, as well as clear up any confusions in a pre-planning meeting.
When having a planning poker session, you want everyone on your team to take an equal part in the game by not playing their cards before all the other players have. It stops one person’s estimation monopolizing team discussion and gives time to communicate gaps or correct estimates as needed. This also allows members to know what they’ve contributed to completing the final estimate and encourages team collaboration.
Not taking time to debate and explain it.
Schedules for poker sessions also allow team members to share feedback without being bullied and better estimations are made without any one member being in charge. However, they also become time-intensive, deliberative sessions consuming precious sprint planning time if not timed and organised.
Teams look through a list of user stories or tasks and guess their effort needs based on cards of various values, which are shown at the same time. It’s meant to find agreement on the relative difficulty of each task so it gets prioritised in a subsequent sprint.
Each round should have its own time to avoid running into a lot of long talk during an estimation meeting. Secondly, a non-sensical space, and guiding employees to stay in their tasks, so that emotions don’t affect decisions during these meetings.
Not teaching team members how to apply the technique correctly.
The poker planning process is not hard to master and understand, but it takes mental effort that no one can always keep up. This can lead to annoyance and slowdown – and the team’s capacity to accurately estimate user stories and work.
Number two in estimation: allowing personal bias to cloud the estimation. : An expert developer will be able to underestimate the complexity of an effort, and novice colleagues will overpromise.
This can be resolved in agile teams by pushing team members to break up big projects into user stories. : Video conferencing can be used to allow teammates at a distance to attend estimation meetings and witness body language. Lastly, frequent re-estimations also enable teams to test task estimates over time and get more accurate over time so they can better predict when they’ll get work done and produce quality work in the project timeline.
