With spaces, your tags, teams, and permissions are shared across all of your rooms. This makes it easier to manage your planning sessions, and keep everything in sync. Gather better insights into your teams estimates, and improve your planning sessions with Spaces. At the beginning of a poker planning session, the product owner or customer reviews an agile user story and reads it aloud.
Now that everyone has heard the story, the group will discuss it. The group will also use this time to ask questions about the story. When played online, members are together in a real-time estimation “room” or “session” and their cards are displayed on the screen. The same rules apply, but everything is more convenient and automated. A simple and fun way to discuss and estimate remotely during sprint planning. At the estimation meeting, each estimator is given one deck of the cards.

As agile evangelists, the Three Five Two development team continues to build new features and improve Planning Poker® through user feedback and constant testing. After everyone has had their say and gotten any questions answered, each person will secretly choose a card from the deck to represent their estimate of story points. When everyone is ready, all participants reveal their cards at the same time. A planning poker session is usually around 30 minutes, and is lead by a SCRUM master or team-lead. The game allows each member to contribute to project planning and encourages lively discussions. Planning Poker® is a consensus-based technique for agile estimating.
To start a poker planning session, the product owner or customer reads one of the desired user stories or describes a feature to the estimators. Planning poker is based on a list of features to be delivered, several copies of a deck of cards, and optionally, an egg timer that can be used to limit time spent in discussion of each item. Now that all of the items in your backlog have estimations, it’s much easier to accurately plan a sprint. Since your entire team has a consensus on how long each task will take, it’s much more likely that you’ll be able to fit the right amount of work into your sprints.

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Now, you and your agile development team can vote on any issue, anytime, anywhere. Imagine you bought a house and you’re planning to remodel the kitchen. You ask a contractor for an estimate on how long the remodel will take and approximately how much it will cost. They give you an estimate, but two months later, you’re regretting your decision because the project is far past the original timeline and well over budget.

• Usually, it’s used to show an estimate of story points (but can also be used to represent the number of ideal days).
• Over the years, Planning Poker has become a staple in the agile community and is now used by thousands of software development teams worldwide.
• The name from this gamified technique is planning poker because participants use physical cards.
• This makes it easier to manage your planning sessions, and keep everything in sync.
• The values represent the number of story points, ideal days, or other units in which the team estimates.
• Alternatively, you can visit our FAQ to see if our support team already has the answers you’re looking for.

You can invite unlimited guests into the virtual Planning Poker sessions. Mountain Goat Software includes a free online Planning Poker tool as part of every Agile Mentors Membership. Import and export stories, estimates and notes instantly to Jira.
Keep your Agile team on the same page by using a work management tool. Asana helps you plan and organize your Agile projects in a tool that’s flexible and collaborative. Whether your team works in a Kanban board or a more linear timeline, Asana has the features to help your Agile team build quickly. Planning Poker is a free online tool for estimating tasks as a team. This tool is designed, developed and maintained by myself, Matt Lewandowski. If you have any comments or suggestions, please feel free to reach out to me here or on any of the social media links below.

Come to a consensus

Although sessions can sometimes take more than one day, it leads to the development of initial estimates that are helpful in sizing or scoping the project. Second, a lively dialogue ensues during poker planning, and estimators are called upon by their peers to justify their estimates. Researchers have found that this improves estimate accuracy, especially on items with a lot of uncertainty as we find on most software projects. The estimators discuss the feature, asking questions of the product owner as needed. When the feature has been fully discussed, each estimator privately selects one card to represent their estimate. The estimators then reveal all of their cards at the same time.

Planning Poker® is a digital card game designed to help empower agile and scrum development teams to collectively set their sprint goals. Using anonymous pointing, Planning Poker® helps to elicit productive conversations across the team to create shared ownership, knowledge, and understanding. Planning Poker® is proven to be one of the most effective sprint planning tools for agile teams.

Scrum Poker for agile teams

But the approach works particularly well for smaller businesses and smaller teams. The more people participate in a planning poker session, the longer it will take to reach a full consensus on each item. Planning poker brings together stakeholders from across departments in the organization to reach a consensus on the estimated effort needed for several backlog initiatives. For an agile software organization, stakeholders can include a product owner, developers, UX designers, QA testers, and product managers, among others.

If a participant continues to agree with their last choice, then they will repeat the card or eventually choose a new one. If you have any issues, concerns, feature ideas or you’d just like to send someone an email, please message us at Any modern browser on desktop, tablet, mobile works pretty well with the The Scrumpy Online https://www.globalcloudteam.com/ application. You can even install as a progressive Web application on your mobile phone for convenience. Membership in AMC is included as a benefit of training with Mountain Goat, but anyone can join AMC and receive access to the Planning Poker tool. We engage with companies to find and engage new customers or markets; pioneer new ventures; and/or create new products, services & business models.
A dominating person in the group can unduly influence the other participants. If you’re not careful, it can lead to estimate driven not by consensus but force of will. The higher a participant’s card is, the more difficult that participant estimates the story will be to complete. Next, the product owner (or possibly a product manager) will read each story out loud to the group. GitHub and GitLab are also integrated with story points as labels. Teams estimating with Planning Poker consistently report that they arrive at more accurate estimates than with any technique they’d used before.

They can log in and meet via their favorite video conferencing tool to communicate during the session. The team repeats the process until they achieve consensus on an estimate. If they lack enough information to agree on an estimate, the estimators can defer a particular item until those details can be acquired. We’ve ensured the Planning Poker Online web app is compatible on all devices.

Import & export with Jira and other project management software available. The cards are numbered as they are to account for the fact that the longer an estimate is, the more uncertainty it contains. Either upload your CSV files or paste several of your issue’s URLs directly into any game and start your project estimation voting process. Access to import project development issues directly from JIRA. For complete integration, our platform also allows you to export and easily save your voting results back into JIRA in just one click. Our crisp and clean interface is not only easy-to-use, but also enables outstanding team engagement for development project estimates.

Planning Poker is a powerful and fun way to improve planning and estimation ceremonies for remote and in-person teams. Instantly import stories from your favorite project management platform like Jira, or write them as you go. Usually, teams arrange a session after creating the initial backlog.