Agile Toolkit Plugin - Planning Poker

Name Agile Toolkit Plugin Version 0.8 Product Versions 2.7 Author(s) John Martin, Nate Oster Homepage Here Price free License BSD JavaDocs agile-toolkit-plugin-0.8-javadoc.jar IssueTracking n/a Download JAR agile-toolkit-plugin-0.8.jar Source In Subversion

Description/Features

The agile toolkit will eventually contain a set of plugins that support agile techniques like Planning Poker.

Planning Poker

Planning Poker (tm) is a trademark of Mountain Goat Software. The term is used by permission of Mike Cohn.

Installation

This is available through the Plugin Repository:

• Installing plugins overview

Usage

Planning Poker Macro

Planning poker is a technique to help teams estimate. Each card has a face value. Each player in the game chooses one of the cards from his/her hand based on how big he or she thinks the whole task is (not just his/her part) and puts it down on the table. When ready, all the cards are revealed and the team discusses the results.

The game is interesting when the estimates are highly divergent. Diverse estimates are an indicator that the team doesn't understand the requirement in the same way, so this is an opportunity to discuss/ask questions/delve into the requirement. Then, try another round and see if the estimates start converging.

The number on the card should not represent any unit of time or cost. These estimates are purposely about size relative to other requirements in the project. We discourage the use of time-based terms like "hours", "days", "seasons of Firefly."

There are three roles for the participants and three states for the game. If the game is not closed, a viewer of the page will be shown a link to join the game. At this point, the poker table is set up and the user is and observer. Since observers do not participate in the estimation process (they are not committed), they are called chickens. A chicken can select the link to become a player (we could call this a pig, I guess). Players are dealt a hand with a selection of estimate cards. While the dealer has the game open for playing, each player will select a card that represents a relative size of the effort in his/her opinion. All players can see when the other players have chosen cards, but not the value of the cards. The dealer can choose to reveal all of the cards at once, at which point, players cannot choose a new card. This is the flop state. After discussion, the dealer can deal again (which puts the game back into the open state) or record a consensus estimate in the page (which puts the game in the closed state).

When a game is closed, only the dealer is provided with a join the game link so that he or she can join the game and choose to re-deal, which pust the game in the open state.

An advantage of using the wiki for the Planning Poker game is that you can gather and evolve your requirements (tasks, whatever) using the wiki format in whatever form you desire. The wiki allows for collaboration during the requirement creation and allows for easy editing, version tracking, and commenting. All of this can be done ahead of the game to help refine the item under estimation. In addition, the estimation exercise can be performed in sync or over a period of time. The underlying mechanism of not revealing the card choices until the dealer calls for it helps to ensure the independence of the estimation process either way. Of course, nothing replaces that conversation that happens when are one or two outlying estimates in a game, though there is the comment stream.

Planning Poker Summary Macro

If you arrange the pages that you want to conduct sizing exercises for as a tree under one page, you can put the Planning Poker Summary macro on that parent page. It will provide a summary of the status of all the games placed on children (and further descendant) pages under the summary page.

Examples

Planning Poker

The Planning Poker macro has one required parameter: dealer

{planning-poker:dealer=taleswapper}
or
{planning-poker:taleswapper}

The dealer controls the state of the game, determining when player card choices are visible to others and saving the result of the game.

Planning Poker Summary

The Planning Poker summary macro has no parameters:

{planning-poker-summary}

It reports on the state of each game on a descendant page under the current one. If a game has recorded an estimate, the estimate and the players involved in contributing to that estimate are also displayed.

Do not embed this in the same page as a Planning Poker game. It will only report on the games of its children and further descendants.

Version History

Version	Date	Comment
0.6	30 April 2008	First release for the contest. Open to comments!
0.7	04 May 2008	Updated macro names, modified db storage, and added page links to games at summary macro. If You Have Games Created With 0.6 Data from games created with 0.6 should automatically transfer into 0.7 format; however, you will have to add the dashes to the macro names on each page. Old games will not show up on the summary page until the names have been changed.
0.8	09 May 2008	Saves to page as table when the estimate is saved, so the version of the page is updated and notifications can occur.

Screenshots

Screenshots
Players can choose cards while the game is "open". Players do not see other players' cards until after the dealer reveals them all.	The dealer controls the game and can also be a player.	The summary macro displays the descendent pages that had games and their results.
On loading the page, the last estimate is shown.	Observers (chickens) can watch but not participate	On the flop, the cards are revealed to everybody at once.
The dealer can save the estimate and close the game. No further play is allowed on this game until the dealer chooses new deal.	The dealer's menu changes as the game progresses.	The player's menu changes as the game progresses.
The dealer has several special powers.