Wednesday, February 24, 2010

Planning Poker and Buckets of Hockey Pucks

The teams I've been working with over the past while have been using planning poker for project estimating. Despite initial and fleeting skepticism by a few when we bring out the cards, as a whole our teams and our sponsors are finding value in this approach. I was reminded today that we should look at poker points as buckets of sand. That is, when deciding between a 5 and an 8, if something is a 6, you can probably still put it into a size 5 bucket if you think of the points as sand that can be heaped at the top of the bucket. Also, a 7 would overflow a size 5 bucket but would fit easily into a size 8.

In light of Canada's 7-3 victory over Russia in Olympic quarter finals, I've decided to change the metaphor to buckets of hockey pucks instead of sand. Go Canada!

P.S. I'll be presenting on Planning Poker in Regina in June at http://www.prairiedevcon.com/