Planning Poker Via Skype
Welcome to pointing poker (aka planning poker)! Online, virtual and co-located agile teams use this application during their planning/pointing sessions to effectively communicate points for stories. Online, virtual and co-located agile teams use this application during their planning/pointing sessions to effectively communicate points for stories. Skype has a huge fan following on the web for its extras, including the 'Play Games' feature. Skype games' popularity made game software companies expand their services by launching the GO Games platform that adds more features and games, to keep the gaming community happy. Playing games on Skype is very simple. Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of development goals in software development. In planning poker, members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table, instead of speaking them aloud. Skype for Business Online will be retired on July 31, 2021 after which the service will no longer be accessible. In addition, PSTN connectivity between your on-premises environment whether through Skype for Business Server or Cloud Connector Edition and Skype for Business Online will no longer be supported.
Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, is a consensus-based, gamified technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of development goals in software development. In planning poker, members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards face-down to the table, instead of speaking them aloud.
Key features:
- Drag-n-drop functionality and unveiling button.
- 14 cards including extra: Infinity, Coffee-break and Question cards.
- Enjoyable unbiased estimation for your planning sessions.
- Planning Poker powers up your agile team.
- Contemporary art on your screen for free.
Useful links:
- Terms of use.
- Get help.
Other apps
Planning Poker (also known as Scrum Poker) is a very popular technique proposed in 2002 by James Grenning. Each player uses a set of cards with Fibonacci sequence numbers on it to estimate the overall effort of a task in Story Points.
Planning Poker procedure
Take in mind that with great popularity came multiple variations of this technique, each team tend to adapt it for their needs. Classic procedure is as follows:
- The Product Owner provides a short overview of a user story that will be estimated by the team. The team can ask questions. Potential clarifications can influence the initial scope.
- Everyone from the team picks one card from his set (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …) and lays it face down in front of him.
- When everyone is ready, the team is turning over cards.
- Members with the highest and lowest estimates should justify their votes and discussion continues.
- Repeat steps 2-4 until a consensus is reached.
Mind the fact, that consensus doesn’t necessarily mean that everyone needs to put the same number. The team might just agree to disagree and put the average or largest number as an estimate.
![Skype Skype](https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Robert_Morgan13/publication/229049468/figure/fig5/AS:300856621715463@1448741216984/Evaluation-table-of-distributed-agile-planning-tools_Q320.jpg)
When to use Planning Poker?
With a strong focus on the discussion, this approach helps to spread the common knowledge of user stories across the team. So Planning Poker is ideal for Scrum Teams, preferably when it is unknown which developer will deal with the issue.
This method shows high accuracy in estimations.
What are the disadvantages?
![Planning poker via skype software Planning poker via skype software](https://image.slidesharecdn.com/2016-01-28scalingagilefordistributedorganizations-160129165554/95/scaling-agile-for-distributed-enterprise-organizations-36-638.jpg?cb=1454086632)
Planning Poker Via Skype Software
Although Planning Poker deals well with new features it throttles when it comes to unknown or uncertain things such as research or bugs.
Planning Poker Via Skype Chat
Another important factor is that this is rather time-consuming. From my experience estimating one task often takes more than 15 minutes and the bigger team the longer it takes to find the consensus.