This small paper has had a big impact. At a stagnant meeting in a company trying to adopt Extreme Programming, we had a logjam. It was taking an hour to agree on a story estimate. That meeting and this little paper was the seed that has powered many agile planning sessions and has helped make planning a more cooperative team activity. Mike Cohn of Mountain Goat software has help popularize planning poker in his books and entertaining and informative lectures.

Introduction

The customer reads a story to the team. Two guys are involved in discussing the impact of the story on the system. Reluctantly, an estimate is tossed out on the table. They go back and forth for quite a while. Everyone else in the room is drifting off, definitely not engaged. The discussion oscillates from one potential solution to another, avoiding putting a number on the card. When the discussion finally ends, the estimate did not really change over all that discussion, 20 minutes wasted. With 25 more stories to estimate, how can we get this meeting moving? Planning Poker.

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