Exercise 2: Two Team Members Aware of the Same Complexity — Possible Solution ==================================================================== RESULTS ------------------------------ One aware (chapter's own scenario): [5, 5, 5, 5, 21], spread=16 Two aware: [5, 5, 5, 21, 21], spread=16 The spread (16 points) is identical in both cases - what changes is the NUMBER of outlier votes, not the size of the disagreement: 1 vote out of 5 versus 2 votes out of 5. ARE TWO MATCHING OUTLIERS MORE OR LESS LIKELY TO TRIGGER DISCUSSION? ------------------------------ More likely, and for a good reason: a single outlier can be (incorrectly) dismissed as one person's own misunderstanding of the task - "maybe Eve just read the ticket wrong." Two independent team members landing on the identical unusual number is much harder to explain away as an individual mistake, since it would require two people to have made the SAME error independently. In practice, two matching outliers function as a form of corroboration - they turn "one person's possibly-mistaken concern" into "a pattern worth taking seriously," even before anyone has explained WHY the number is high. WHY THIS WORKS AS AN ANSWER ------------------------------ This reveals a real strength of planning poker's simultaneous-reveal mechanism the chapter's own single-outlier example didn't fully demonstrate: it doesn't just surface disagreement, it lets the team gauge how WIDELY a concern is shared, purely from the raw vote distribution, before a single word of discussion has happened. An anchored, sequential process would have hidden this signal entirely - both aware team members would likely have compromised toward the first announced number, and the fact that two independent people held the same concern would never have become visible at all.