If you have been involved with agile software development in any form or fashion, chances are you’ve spent some time estimating effort or relative size of user stories. This is often done by selecting a card from a special planning poker deck. A typical planning poker deck is based on a Fibonacci sequence (e.g. 0, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8…) though the sequence is sometimes modified after 13 for even numbers (e.g. 20, 40, 100). This process works fairly well when all participants are located relatively close to each other (i.e. in the same room). What if the team members are geographically separated?
It just so happens that a fellow Visual Studio ALM MVP, Mike Douglas, has recently released TFS Agile Poker for Windows 8 that works with Microsoft’s Team Foundation Server (or Team Foundation Service).
TFS Agile Poker is a free cross-platform tool for distributed and co-located teams to point (i.e. estimate) your Team Foundation Server backlog. TFS Agile Poker can be used with Team Foundation Service or or your on-premises Team Foundation Server 2010 or 2012 installation using theTFS OData Services.
Microsoft’s Brian Keller selected TFS Agile Poker as his pick of the week in This Week On Channel 9 (starting at 14:14 in the video).
The app is free and is currently available for Windows 8 with plans for Windows Phone, Web/HTML5, Android, and iOS. Read more about this app here.