Scrum Master Planning Poker

Planning poker (also called scrum poker) assists agile teams in estimating the amount of time and effort required to complete every initiative on one‘s product backlog.

What is a Scrum Master? The Role and Responsibilities

A Scrum Master is an agile development group facilitator. Scrum is a technique that enables a team to organize itself quickly and make changes according to agile principles. The Scrum Master facilitates the process of exchanging information.

Role and Responsibilities

As a component of the Scrum framework, the Scrum Master position was created. In most cases, the role has no real influence (also known as servant-leadership). The name was originally intended to denote someone who is knowledgeable about Scrum and can thus coach others.

The Scrum Master is also in charge of improving interactions between both the Scrum Team and the organization to maximize the Scrum team's productivity. Eventually, this same Scrum Master is in charge of organizing and facilitating team meetings such as Daily Scrum, planned events, sprint retrospectives, and so on.

Is Scrum Master involved in poker planning?

The Scrum Master will also be at a planning poker meeting. Scrum Master is a team facilitator and hence the Scrum Master is supposed to participate in all weekly meetings, and there is no exception to a Poker Planning session... The owner of the product describes every item to a team before estimating it.

Play Planning Poker in Scrum Team

User stories could be estimated better and more significantly. I'd want to explore Poker Planning today in Scrum.

Planning Poker

Poker Planning in Agility is a holistic way of demand forecasting.

How does planning poker works?

The project management team from Scrum Master, as well as the Scrum design team, sits together. The owner reviews the agile record of a progressive group, the estimator, and describes it.

The Scrum Master provides the planning card deck for estimators of card values such as 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, or 100(series Fibonacci) that is the order that we advise. These are all the number of stories, perfect moments, and even other units in which the team forecasts.

The product owner outlines the characteristics of the development team while asking user history questions. Once the development team answers all questions, the poker card is taken by the Scrum Master so each estimator selects secretly one card to symbolize their estimate.

The Scrum Master next invites all estimators to disclose simultaneously the picked cards. If not, scrum Master will organize a dialogue with the estimators, and each estimator will explain why the value has been placed.

The high low estimator must be justified, but then the Scrum Master finished the discussion and requested the development team again to select the card and place it if all cards are of the same value as the following narrative.

The Poker Planned process repeats until consensus is reached, or until the estimation methods opt to delay agile estimations and planning until new information is obtained.

Rules of the Planning Poker Game

1. People with responsibility for certain tasks will vote on them

Quite often, team members allow everyone to vote even if they don't know what they're doing.

1. Managers should not vote

The commitments of a leader are usually not time-consuming, so their votes are usually too low. It is therefore advisable to not vote but to allow them in one instance to have a veto and over group agreement.

If the case length has doubled abnormally, the manager can ask if the team has considered something that may not have increased its size. He or she might end up making these suggestions, but he or she has no power to direct this same team to reduce their size.

1. Picking the larger size or points during ties

If you have ties between two successive sizes or points, just select the larger size and proceed.

Keep in mind if you use the Fibonacci series to estimate back-to-back sizes of 5 and 8. There will be no one complaining because a tie requires time to resolve the higher numbers.

1. Don’t embark on a deep implementation discussion

Groups usually lead to specialized interests while discussing a user story. To some extent that is okay, but due to time constraints, it must be limited. It will be enough to talk for nearly one minute.

The longer the team spends thinking, the more difficult it is. A team is therefore encouraged to follow another much safer approach to a solution, allowing them to calculate the quantity much faster.

1. Use the ‘I need a break’ card

We shouldn't forget that although the squad plays hard, certain players might require a brief break. You can utilize the 'I need a break' card to catch the attention of everybody for the break.

1. Use timers to reduce discussion

As mentioned above, there must be one minute of debate so that timepieces can be used.

1. Picking the largest size on the third round

The third round of voting must be completed before you can proceed. If there is no consensus by the third round of voting, you must take the largest size and Team members are given plenty of time to complete their tasks when they choose the largest size possible. Members are less likely to complain about not having enough time to complete tasks whenever the actual work begins.

1. Let the Product Owner meet QA leads and Development leads ahead of time

To ensure all user history queries are addressed, the PO fulfills the Dev and QA guidelines before the Planning Poker Conference. Instead of engaging in information collection throughout the game session, the team might concentrate on size.

1. Don’t forget the baseline

Whatever a team adopts as a pattern, all iterations should be consistent. If a day is chosen as a size, it must also serve as a reference for other iterations. If a certain user story is length 1 or size 3, the iterations must remain constant.

How do you utilize Scrum for poker planning?

Poker planning (also called Scrum poker) lets agility teams calculate the time and energy needed to finish the product backlog for each initiative. The name of this gamified strategy is poker planning because people utilize physical cards.