Planning Poker Tools

Updated:  6/19/2021

Mike Cohn has the phrase ‘planning poker’ registered.  So, this is acknowledgement of that. And, like Kleenex, that’s what we call the thing itself.  It no longer has a generic name. (Well, the real name is maybe ‘wide-band delphi estimation using the Fibonacci sequence.’  But planning poker or priority poker are faster.)

And, as some readers know, I like Priority Poker too. (Where you use the same basic technique with different ‘experts’ to estimate business value.)

So, for this post…. what are the best tools, sites or apps?

First, I like using the cards themselves.  This is great.  Remember that the proper way of doing it, say with 5 people, is to average the numbers once they get ‘close’.  (We usually define close as ‘within 3 PP cards’ — ex: all votes are either 5 or 8 or 13.)  Average. Do not make them agree on one PP card.

So, when using the cards, the hard part is addition and division.  Which I learned, but later got bad at.  Now, if you have Philip on your team (and Philip does addition and division wonderfully in his head), then you have no problem.  If your team is collocated.

But, I don’t always have Philip.

Here are some tools:

http://hat.jit.su  (thanks to Jaime Carter)

Planningpoker.com from Mike Cohn

And there are a host of iOS apps that I know of.  Maybe 15 different ones now??  Go to the App Store and search.

I am still looking for one to do the averaging for me.  But I like those those two sites above.

Added:  I really like pointingpoker.com.     Why?  Simple, allows true Fibonacci numbers, does the addition and the division to get the average.

Comments?  Suggestions?

 

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