Our mobile-friendly experience allows you to join your planning sessions from anywhere. No need to download another app, just open the link and start playing. The decks are intentionally kept minimal with considerable number-jumps. Doing this ensures that for each story, everyone can reach a consensus number.

Planning poker should force people to think independently and propose their numbers simultaneously. This is accomplished by requiring that all participants show their cards at the same time. It is most commonly used in agile software development, in particular in Scrum and Extreme Programming. As the scrum poker leader, our sidebar enables you to streamline the issues your agile development team is currently working on.

What is Planning Poker?

A user story is a general and informal explanation of a software feature that describes how it will offer value to the end-user (i.e. the customer). These Planning Poker cards display values like 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40 and 100 (the modified Fibonacci sequence). The values represent the number of story points, ideal days, or other units in which the team estimates. After this discussion is complete, everyone reselects their cards.

Create a planning poker room for your team, with custom cards and personalized settings. If a player shows a higher card, it conveys that the story will be completed with greater difficulty and take a longer period to complete. The moderator (either the product owner or product manager) narrates the story to the group. If participants have any questions, the moderator answers them. But if the cards differ, then the group continues its discussion about the story. Those with higher (or lower) estimates than the rest of the group will explain their reasoning and try to persuade their coworkers to see their position.

Key Features

It is a fun and engaging way for teams to apply relative estimates to planned work. However, if the cards continue to vary, then further discussions on the story will follow. Participants with higher or lower estimates than others will communicate their points of view. Then, they’ll attempt to convince their teammates to understand their differing numbers. Each one has a number that the team has agreed to use as their estimate.
When teams are not in the same geographical locations, collaborative software over the internet can be used as replacement for physical cards. Several web applications and mobile applications exist for the purpose. The feature list, often a list of user stories, describes some software that needs to be developed.
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• These teams not only have to put effort into determining how to estimate, but they also have to pick the right timing to do it.
• Once your team finishes the discussion of one user story, then each estimator chooses a card that corresponds to the amount of effort or story points they think correlate to that backlog item.
• The more people participate in a planning poker session, the longer it will take to reach a full consensus on each item.
• Then, they’ll attempt to convince their teammates to understand their differing numbers.
• That’s why it’s usually more convenient for teams to conduct sessions once per iteration.

Giving participants too many options—say, each number from 1 to 50—would make the process inefficient. This is a free, open-source application developed as a hobby project. The app is free to use, with additional Premium features available for SCRUM masters. By subscribing to Premium, you also support the ongoing development of this open-source project. The game can be played with different card sets which denote story points or developer hours, depending on the team’s taste. The Scrumpy Online Planning Poker application allows you to vote in advance when your teams work in different time zones.
Teams use Planning Poker when the initial product backlog is created. Most teams hold a story-writing workshop to write and estimate the initial product backlog. To understand the scope and size of a project, the whole team is encouraged to write user stories and create initial estimates of the work. The whole team includes the developers (team members), Scrum Master, and product owner. Often, management pressures product development teams to improve the accuracy of their predictions – but it’s easier said than done.

Regular, Fibonacci, T-Shirt voting

One reason Planning Poker leads to better estimates is because it brings together multiple expert opinions. Because these experts form a cross-functional team from all disciplines on a software project, they are better suited to the estimation task than anyone else. If all estimators all selected the same value, that becomes the estimate. The high and low estimators, especially, should share their reasons.

Once your team finishes the discussion of one user story, then each estimator chooses a card that corresponds to the amount of effort or story points they think correlate to that backlog item. If everyone chooses the same estimate, that becomes the official estimate for that backlog item. In 2002, James Grenning created planning poker commonly referred to as “scrum poker”. He believed that the then-popular estimation approach, Wideband Delphi – a method from the 1950s – took too much time, among other limitations. Spaces are a way for you to manage multiple planning poker sessions for your organisation or team. You can create a space, invite your team, and then create rooms for your planning poker sessions.

The Scrumpy Online Planning Poker application automatically generates a Confluence summary page with the anonymous results of the voting, ticket by ticket with the average and chosen estimate. The reason for using the Fibonacci sequence instead of simply doubling each subsequent value is because estimating a task as exactly double the effort as another task is misleadingly precise. A task that is about twice as much effort as a 5, has to be evaluated as either a bit less than double (8) or a bit more than double (13). Promote users to admin and add users into teams for better analytics. The group will also try to learn more about the story and ask questions to understand it better.

Get in touch with us today and we’ll happily answer any questions you may have. Alternatively, you can visit our FAQ to see if our support team already has the answers you’re looking for. Quickly and easily invite your entire team to the room with a shareable link. Once this new deliberation ends, everyone will go through their deck and show them again.

After further discussion, each estimator reselects an estimate card, and all cards are again revealed at the same time. The reason to use planning poker is to avoid the influence of the other participants. If a number is spoken, it can sound like a suggestion and influence the other participants’ sizing.
The Scrum Master can later only collect the votes and complete the estimation. The application supports pretty well the most commonly used voting cards for points and time. If the predefined mapping is not a perfect match, custom mapping is available for every card. In addition, Planning Poker playing cards are available in the Mountain Goat Software store. Mountain Goat Software’s branded Planning Poker cards are sold at cost as a courtesy to the agile community. Simply log in to the tool and preload a set of items to be estimated.