A known roadblock that project managers, product managers, and software developers face is the estimation process, where they have to predict the effort that needed to finish a development task. Estimation is a double-edged sword – it’s incredibly helpful to break long-term projects into manageable and short-term tasks, but a wrong move can derail long-term project planning.

Often, management pressures product development teams to improve the accuracy of their predictions – but it’s easier said than done. These teams not only have to put effort into determining how to estimate, but they also have to pick the right timing to do it. One technique that can simplify estimation in agile is planning poker. Let’s discuss this approach in depth.

In 2002, James Grenning created planning poker. He believed that the then-popular estimation approach, Wideband Delphi – a method from the 1950s – took too much time, among other limitations. For Grenning, planning poker was initially about “solving the problem of people in agreement talking too much and dominating the effort.” Later, Mike Cohn, co-founder of Agile Alliance and Scrum Alliance, popularized the technique in his book Agile Estimating and Planning.

It's the card game that makes estimation simple and collaborative for software teams, often praticing Scrum.

Planning poker, also known as “scrum poker” and “pointing poker”, is a gamified technique that development teams use to guess the effort of project management tasks. These estimations are based on the entire group’s input and consensus, making them more engaging and accurate than other methods. To help gauge the number of story points for the relevant tasks, teams use planning poker cards, which are similar to poker cards.