Going Agile: Poker Planning In Action

The Certification team at Canonical has been Going Agile now for the last 9 months. Oneiric is the first release that we are running full Scrum practices. We are a bit unique as we are spread all over the world. We have 2 people in Montreal (Canada), 1 person in Boston (USA) , 1 person in Raleigh (USA), 3 scatter over the United Kingdom, our Scrum Master is in Germany, and our latest team member is in Taipei (Taiwan). Running Scrum in this type of  environment needs constant innovation. I am keeping track of our progress in my blog at victorpalau.net/tag/scrum/

Roughly every three months, we get together somewhere in the world. We just got back from the Ubuntu Rally in Dublin, where we decided to give our backlog some love!

We largely build our backlog at the Ubuntu Developer Summits and then we continue to add and remove items as we go.

Halfway through the project and with over 100 items to complete before the end of October, we needed to step back and make sure that we were working on the right priorities and that nothing had fallen trough the cracks. What better way to do this than a full poker planning session. Here is how it worked:

• We use real cards that I brought over from home
• We clear up a round table big enough to fit the whole team and we booked an hour and a half for the session.
• We had a house dealer: I chair the session, I did not participate on the poker, my computer was the only one allowed at the table.
• Using the list view in our google docs backlog, we reviewed a blueprint at the time
• We spent less than 90 seconds per use case.
• We use the following t-shirt sizes as measure of effort required to complete a use case: S,M,L & XL
• Where there was substantial disagreement on size, we asked the highest and lowest  bid to briefly reason their decision. If needed, we did another sizing round after that.