Planning Poker Tools

Mike Cohn has the phrase ‘planning poker’ registered.  So, this is acknowledgement of that. And, like Kleenex, that’s what we call the thing itself.  It no longer has a generic name.

And, as some readers know, I like Priority Poker too.

So, for this post…. what are the best tools, sites or apps?

First, I like using the cards themselves.  This is great, except that the proper way of doing it, say with 5 people, is to average the numbers once they get ‘close’.  (We usually define close as ‘within 3 PP cards — ex: all votes are either 5 or 8 or 13.)

So, when using the cards, the hard part is addition and division.  Which I learned, but later got bad at.  Now, if you have Philip on your team (and Philip does addition and division wonderfully in his head), then you have no problem.  If your team is collocated.

But, I don’t always have Philip.

Here are some tools:
http://hat.jit.su  (thanks for Jaime Carter)
Planningpoker.com from Mike Cohn

And there are a host of iOS apps that I know of.  Maybe 15 different ones??

I am still looking for one to do the averaging for me.  But I like those those two sites above.

Comments?  Suggestions?