Spooky Planning

Planning Poker is a collaborative estimation technique used by agile teams to estimate the effort required for user stories and tasks. Team members use cards with numbers to vote on complexity, promoting discussion and consensus-building for more accurate sprint planning.

A Planning Poker room is your team's virtual space for estimation sessions. Simply create a room, share the permanent URL with your team members, and start voting on user stories together. Our rooms support unlimited players and stay active for future sessions.

We support multiple voting scales including the popular Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13...), T-shirt sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL), linear scales, and custom scales. Choose the one that best fits your team's estimation style and project needs.

Planning Poker promotes transparency, reduces estimation bias, and ensures all team members contribute to the estimation process. It helps teams gain shared understanding of work complexity and makes sprint planning more accurate and collaborative.

By having everyone vote simultaneously and then discuss their reasoning, Planning Poker encourages open dialogue and knowledge sharing. Team members can challenge assumptions, share insights, and learn from each other's perspectives, leading to better estimates and stronger team alignment.

You can estimate any work item: user stories, technical tasks, bug fixes, epics, or research spikes. Planning Poker works for any item that needs effort estimation for planning purposes, making it versatile for different types of agile work.

By having everyone vote anonymously first, Planning Poker prevents anchoring bias where early estimates influence others. The discussion phase allows team members to challenge assumptions and share different perspectives, leading to more balanced and accurate estimates.

Use Planning Poker during sprint planning, backlog refinement, or whenever you need to estimate work items. It's most effective when the whole team participates and you have user stories that need effort estimation before committing to a sprint.

Spooky Planning stands out as the ultimate Planning Poker tool because it's completely free forever with no feature restrictions, supports unlimited players and sessions, requires no complex setup, and provides permanent room URLs with session history. While other tools cost $30+ per month with limited features, we offer everything you need for effective agile estimation at no cost.

Yes! Studies show that Planning Poker consistently produces more accurate estimates than individual estimation or traditional group discussions. The combination of independent thinking followed by collaborative discussion leverages collective intelligence while minimizing cognitive biases.