One of the most important moments for development teams that use Agile methodology is when planning a Sprint.
This event determines the precise and distributed progress of activities over the working days.
But, how to plan activities well without knowing the time needed to perform them?
Very simple: using the Planning Poker method.
In this method, each analyst determines the time he deems necessary for the execution of the activity, and confronts it with the time of the other programmers. However, of course, only the times of each one are revealed at the end of the round, so that no one influences the other’s decision.
To facilitate this work, and in times of Remote work, I created a tool using one of my components on GitHub to perform the group estimates, simply and quickly.
You can get this tool for free through the link:
https://github.com/digao-dalpiaz/Planning-Poker
As you can see, the software works just like a client / server game, where one of the participants must be the server, and then the others will connect to it remotely, just by entering their address.
After all users are connected, the server can start an estimation round at any time, where each participant can inform the estimated value for a given activity. When all connected users have completed their estimates, the system automatically reveals all statistical values for the round. In addition, the server can end the round at any time, manually, if necessary.
It is common to consider that a round was satisfactory if the proximity is equal to or greater than 50%. Otherwise, it means that a new round and possibly a new discussion about the activity will be necessary.
Does your team use agile methodology? How do you plan activities? Comment on your experiences.