A Comparison of the Planning Poker and Team Estimation Game: A Case Study in Software Development Capstone Project Course

Effort estimation is a crucial part of software development projects. Despite the availability of several assessment techniques, accurate assessment still remains an extremely difficult task. Team Estimation Game is a relatively new estimation technique for agile software development methods that has not received significant attention from the scientific community despite its growing popularity between practitioners. In this paper, we attempt to bridge this gap by presenting the results of an empirical study with undergraduate students in which we compare Team Estimation Game with the more established Planning Poker technique. We mainly focus our analysis of the two techniques on the time needed for user story estimation and estimation accuracy. The results of the empirical study reveal that Team Estimation Game produces more accurate story estimates than Planning Poker. Additionally, we found that for the Team Estimation Game, estimation and planning skills of the development teams improve from Sprint to Sprint. Team Estimation Game proved to be a useful estimation method for agile projects within the capstone course. Furthermore, we have shown that the study can be successfully incorporated into a software engineering capstone course without hindering the teaching goals while retaining the validity of research goals.