Planning Poker
The gamification of Agile planning poker
Planning poker® is a part of many Agile team’s rituals and is used during the estimation of stories. The main goal of planning poker is to enable the team to estimate their stories in a fun way – but it also helps the estimation process in many ways. I’ve been using some variant of it with all my development teams for ages now, and I love it, so I thought to myself, how can I gamify planning poker?
Planning Poker® is a registered trademark of Mike Cohn.
Goals
The main goals of making story estimation more engaging are to:
- Maintain a good habit – Help the team continue to estimate stories.
- Help with team engagement – Keep everyone focused on planning and having fun.
Measuring Impact
To make sure we meet the goals of the project we need to measure and reflect that measurement to the users. This way they can understand their own progress and make the determination if this practice is helpful to the team or not.
Engagement Measures
- Participation. Easy to measure and simple to understand for the players.
- Use: We will count each time a user opens the app.
- Joins: We will count each time a user joins a poker planning room.
- Persistence. Continuing to use the app over time.
- Reuse: We will count consecutive uses of the app over a month, with more points being awarded for more usage during the same month.
We will look at the usage and frequency of usage to determine if the app is successful. These are also metrics that we will use in the app for a reward system that should improve engagement.
These metrics can be applied to individual users and aggregated to give us a view of how the app is being used.
I wonder what else we could use to measure the interest of our users.
