I work in a SCRUM team and we had a session of pokering just minutes ago. I had (still have) an idea of 'how should I poker' but my team had another idea of it. I come today in front of you to ask if I should change the way I see pokering or is the environment (team) not 'SCRUM-enaugh'...
We had this story .. I pokered 50 storypoints (the numbers are not important, the idea is), 2 colleagues pokered 10, the rest of the team pokered an average of 25. We talked over this a bit and we decided to repoker.
As my experience has not improved during the talks, nor the requirements changed, I decided to still poker 50 on it while the rest of the team 'agreed' on a 25 storyPoints estimation.
25 remained.
My argument: after the talks, I consider my knowledge on the story is the same, the requirements are the same thus my estimation is the same.
Team argument: after the talks, we saw that there are 2 guys that know exactly what the story is about and they estimated 25 so we are going to poker all 25 because 'there would be a 25 sp effort of the team'
Should I change the way I see pokering or is the environment (team) not 'SCRUM-enaugh'... ??
Thank you guys.
The situation looks good enough to me. When people after discussion still do not converge toward same estimation, it is a common practice to take the mean (in your case about 25).
It is also common that different people in a team have different "bias": some people tend to over-estimate all stories, other tends to lower-estimate. That's why the mean is a good estimation.
Anyway, after some iterations, you and the team will have more knowledge about the difficulty of this kind of story. The estimation should become easier as all team members would be able to refer to a past experience instead of a best-guess of a complexity.