Is Planning Poker Fibonacci?

Planning poker is a popular game used by agile software development teams to estimate the relative size of development tasks. The game is simple: each player is dealt a hand of cards, with the values in the deck representing different estimates of the task at hand.

The player with the highest estimate wins the round, and the losing players must match or exceed that estimate in order to stay in the game.

The most common values in a planning poker deck are the Fibonacci numbers, which are thought to more accurately reflect the uncertainty inherent in estimation. This is because each successive number in the sequence is approximately 1.

6 times larger than the previous number, which mirrors the way that uncertainty tends to increase as more details are unknown.

Some planning poker decks also include other values like “0” (for tasks that are too small to estimate) and “infinity” (for tasks that are too large or complex to estimate). Including these extra values gives players more flexibility in their estimates and can help avoid some of the common pitfalls of planning poker, like anchoring on one value or getting caught up in guessing what other people are thinking.

So, is planning poker Fibonacci? While the most common values used in planning poker decks are based on the Fibonacci sequence, this isn’t always the case. Some decks may use different values, like powers of two or even custom values specific to the project at hand.

As long as everyone playing knows and agrees on what the values represent, any set of numbers can be used for planning poker.