26 Planning Poker
We will practice planning using planning poker cards created by Redbooth (2025)
Planning poker practice
Review each scenario with your group and decide on a story point value for each. For reference, an anchor story has been provided for each scenario, which you can use for comparison.
Standard cards
1-100: points based on your estimation of the task’s complexity, uncertainty and effort
\(\infty\): When pigs fly (wouldn’t it be awesome if…)
Special cards
While not strictly in line with typical planning poker, these can be amusing and aid communication about special situations:
?: Here be dragons (unknown, potentially risky territory)
Ping pong: “I need a coffee break”
Brownie: Comerse un marrón, referring to a difficult or unpleasant task that we got stuck with
Shaving a Yak: Refers to all the stuff that comes with some tasks (i.e. all the things that need to be done but aren’t exactly part of the task itself) (Hanselman 2014)
Simple bug fix
We have just finished planning an update of the copyright year in the footer of all public-facing pages, and assigned it 2 story points.
The next task is to plan is to fix a broken link on the company’s main webstie landing page.
Standard feature request
We have just finished planning an email notification for users when their order status changes from ‘Processing’ to ‘Shipped’ and assigned it 3 story points.
The next task to plan is to implement a ‘Forgot Password’ functionality with email confirmation.
Integration with third-party tool
We have just finished planning a connector between a new user sign up form to an existing custor relationship management API and assigned it 5 points.
The next task to plan is integration of a new payment gateway (e.g. Stripe) to accept a new credit card type.
Significant database migration/upgrade
We have just finished planning optimization of the three slowest-performing database queries by adding a new index and assigned it 8 points.
The next task to plan is the upgrade of the primary customer database schema to support international character sets and a new indexing strategy.
Research & discovery
We have just finished planning the research and documentation of three alternative cloud storage providers, with a recommendation on who to select, and assigned it 5 ponits.
The next task to plan is a feasibility study and prototype development for replacing the current internal reporting tool with an open-source solution.