A couple of years ago, I wrote a post about using planning poker in Agile teams, for estimating user story size. But that was when we were all sitting in the same room and not shielding from Covid-19.
Things have changed now. Here are a few options that I’ve tried.
PlanITpoker
My favourite dedicated planning poker tool is PlanITpoker. You don’t even need an account, you can use their “start a quick play” feature. The user interface is clean and intuitive.
What is nice is that you can prepare for the meeting beforehand by entering the user story IDs and PlanITpoker will remember the votes for each story.
Zoom
This one I discovered quite by accident: Zoom has a built-in polls feature.
Simply create a question with your story point values as options. You can use Planning poker, Fibonacci, t-shirt sizes, etc… whatever works for your team.
Start the poll, then when everyone is done, show them the results:
This is useful for any ad hoc estimates that need to be worked on without needing to spin up a larger, more dedicated planning poker application.
What resources do you find most useful?
