Schedule estimation is one of the hardest thing when planning a software project. How many times a simple project wasn’t finished in a planned schedule? Quite many…
Agile software development methodologies have brought many useful techniques to improve estimation and to monitor project progress more efficiently. Planning poker is one of the enjoyable ones. It combines expert opinion, analogy, and disaggregation into an enjoyable approach to estimating that results in quick but reliable estimates.
Our team have started to use user stories, story points and planning poker a while back. Now that we have “played” a few rounds of planning game it already feels much better then estimating the tasks using hours or days as units. We aren’t yet in a point where we are having 100% correct estimations but we are definitely going to a right direction.
In planning poker the estimation units are called story points and they don’t relate to any real time units. Each user story is comparable to with each other and this will eventually makeup the story point scale for your team to use. I think that the real power of the story points is achieved when team have gathered a short history (few sprints or more) of story points as then the team can calculate their velocity according to the completed story points and plan upcoming sprints more accurately.
If your team is planning to try it out I recommend you to get real deck of planning cards from Mike Cohn at Mountain Goat Software as it gives the release planning sessions a right attitude. Or if your team is distributed around the world then you can use nice (and free) web version at http://www.planningpoker.com
We have just released v1.6 of Mobile Trail Explorer. This release doesn’t have huge amount of new features but contains many small fixes and improvements.