Nobody really likes project management and task estimation, but it’s a necessary evil of product development. I’ve seen quite a few ways to handle estimating tasks; some of which work better than others but none of them I would classify as “fun”. Until now… On a current project with a vendor I was exposed to a process and tool called poker planning. It’s a very simple card based game which is used for a group of people to come to a consensus on the estimate for a task list. There is a free tool that will host a game for you called Planning Poker. The process is pretty simple…

1. Come up with the global user story list for the project
2. Import these user stories into the Planning Poker tool
3. The players of the game are the developers who will be implementing the user story, the product owner does not play but needs to be available
4. For each user story do the following in less than 2 minutes each…
5. The product owner gives a quick description of the user story
6. All of the players choose a card which represents the relative amount of work that user story will take to implement; note these are only relative numbers, not absolute man-days
7. All of the cards are turned over for everyone to see.
8. The players with the highest and lowest cards must both explain their rationale behind their high and low choices
9. The turn is played again until their is a consensus about the amount of effort

At the end of the process you have a relative effort value of each user story. The next step is to map and agree on how to translate those values into absolute working days. Once you get into the process it’s quite fun and effective. I suggest you try it out on your next small project or iteration.