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Estimation poker

Size the backlog where you plan it. Estimation poker is a right-rail card on the planning sprint that lets a team resolve unestimated stories in-place — no tabbing out to a separate poker app and copying numbers back by hand.

How it works

Section titled “How it works”

When a planned sprint has at least one candidate without story points, the Estimation poker card appears in the planning workspace.

  1. Open a round. A facilitator — a Scrum Master, Product Owner, or project admin — starts poker on the next unestimated candidate.
  2. Vote. Each team member picks a Fibonacci card (1 / 2 / 3 / 5 / 8 / 13 / 21, or ”?” for unsure). Votes are hidden while the round is open — you see only how many people have voted, never who voted what, so nobody anchors on the first number called out.
  3. Reveal. The facilitator reveals all votes at once. Every card is shown side by side.
  4. Discuss the outlier. When the spread is wide — the highest and lowest votes diverge by at least two cards — the card surfaces an outlier prompt, the cue to ask “why are we 3 versus 13?” before settling.
  5. Commit. The facilitator commits the agreed value (defaulting to the team’s most-common vote). Committing writes the number straight to the story’s story points and closes the round, and the card advances to the next unestimated candidate.

If the team can’t agree, the facilitator can re-vote — reopening the round keeps the existing votes so people adjust rather than start over.

Live and team-owned

Section titled “Live and team-owned”

Poker is a live, multi-writer ceremony: everyone votes on their own screen and the room stays in sync in real time. The estimate belongs to the team — it feeds the team’s own velocity, and individual votes are never aggregated into a per-person history.

Notes

Section titled “Notes”
  • Poker runs on a planning sprint, before activation, so committing an estimate sets the story’s initial size rather than changing scope mid-sprint.
  • Only the Fibonacci scale is offered — the scale most teams already use.
  • The committed value lands on the same story_points field the sprint backlog and velocity read, so no re-entry is needed.