What is Scrum Poker and Why You Should Use It
If you’ve ever worked in an agile environment, you are probably familiar with the consensus based estimating technique named Scrum Poker (or Planning Poker). It’s a technique used by developers, designers, and anyone else involved in a certain project, in order to estimate needed effort or complication level of different development goals. Basically, Scrum Poker is a simple tools for voting on how many story points a story has in a Scrum process in an easy and efficient way. When the team members have different opinions about the difficulty of a certain task, Scrum poker apps can be quite helpful.
Story points differentiate from app to app, but the most of them follow the Fibonacci numbers, starting from 0 to 8, where 0 stands for a task requiring almost zero effort, while 8 (sometimes 13 or more) stands for maximum difficulty.
With the Scrum Poker technique, our estimations became more precise, but our creative side wasn’t happy with the solutions in the store. So, we’ve designed and developed our very own Scrum poker app named ScrumFaces. In addition to Fibonacci numbers, the app also contains a question mark, infinity sign and coffee break illustrations. We’ve found that any story over 8 points should probably be split up into multiple smaller points. This is why we decided to stop at 8. If something is really hard, you can always pick “infinity”. :)
With marvelous illustrations, COBE’s ScrumFaces App makes the needed effort clearly visualized, and improves the understanding of the difficulty of a task. Good news — early bird version is now available for download — for iPhone or for Android.
How does it work?
- Every single member estimates the needed effort and determines one value
- All the members show their devices, so everyone can see the display
- Each card on every device will be shown by tapping or shaking the device
- Now every member knows every estimation and the story points can be determined
Quite simple, isn’t it? Download it here:
To see more of our design, be sure to check our Dribbble account. Also, if you are interested in UX or design in general, check out the new book written by our very own Felix van de Sand. (Note: the book is only available in German at the moment). Looking forward to your feedback! :)
