Planning poker with new teams

Working remotely with people scattered all over the globe, you end up with situations when you have a team in place, not everyone is accustomed to agile or they’ve worked on some kind of skewed implementation of it and you need to start estimating things for the first sprint.

Some of the people might be stuck with time estimates (I’ll need 4h to finish this task — how many time you heard that one?)

Before jumping to the actual session, have a brief meeting with the following objectives:

• there is this tendency to make a connection between time and story points; maybe would be good to clarify a bit the context
• we are not measuring individual capacity, but the team capacity
• we are collaborating, so a certain task can be done by 1–2–3 developers that help each other
• goal is for the team to deliver the stories, not individuals
• we (want to) encourage team work so that the stories are delivered, as a team, part of the sprint
• after a few sprints we can look at things such as: this team can deliver 37 story points worth of tasks in a sprint (2 weeks);
• so when we plan a sprint we know that this is the capacity and what we can take in a sprint
• we will not aim to be able to say that this person will do this task in 3 hours (and that is not the point).
• you don’t have to be an expert in a certain field to be able to come up with an estimate for a task:
• task should be clear about what are the requirements for it (DOD)
• prepare some reference stories (what is 1 story point, what is 5 and so on)

I don’t agree with the approach of: this story is reactjs work and I am a php developer/dev ops and can’t estimate it; I should be able to estimate it based on reference stories and reading the requirements.

And I can’t stress this enough, the Scrum Master should understand clearly what is being required for each task. Doesn’t have to go in all the technicalities, but if this is about changing something on an invoice or some task related to the product import, the Scrum Master should have clarity over what is being done there. You can’t guide if you don’t know where you are going.