Spooky Planning

Guide

What is planning poker?

Planning poker is a way for a team to estimate work together. Everyone picks a card in private, the cards are shown at the same moment, and the team talks about any difference before agreeing on a number. It is used in agile teams to size user stories, bugs and tasks, most often during sprint planning and backlog refinement.

The technique is also called scrum poker and pointing poker. The names mean the same thing: private votes on a shared scale, revealed together. "Pointing" comes from story points, the unit many teams use for the size of a story.

How a planning poker session runs

1. Pick a story. The product owner or facilitator reads out one item and answers questions about what it involves.

2. Vote in private. Each person chooses one card from the scale, such as 1, 2, 3, 5, 8 or 13. Nobody can see anyone else's choice yet.

3. Reveal together. When everyone has voted, all cards are shown at once.

4. Talk about the gap. If the cards agree, the team records the estimate and moves on. If they differ, the people with the lowest and highest cards explain their reasoning, and the team votes again.

5. Repeat. The team goes through the backlog one story at a time.

The cards do not measure hours. They express relative size: how big a story is compared with others the team has already done. Two or three rounds on a story are normal, and a story that never converges is usually a sign that it needs to be split or that nobody understands it well enough yet.

Why votes are hidden

The main reason for hiding votes is anchoring. When a senior engineer says "that is a 3" before anyone else has spoken, the rest of the room tends to drift toward 3, even if they privately thought 8. Voting first and revealing together keeps each person's own judgment in the room. The disagreements that follow are the useful part: they surface assumptions, missing details and risks that a single estimator would have missed.

In a small study of one team, estimates made with planning poker were more accurate than the statistical combination of the same people's individual estimates (Haugen and Moløkken-Østvold, 2006, doi.org/10.1109/AGILE.2006.16). One study is not proof, but it fits what teams report.

Planning poker, scrum poker and pointing poker

These are three names for one technique. Planning poker is the original name, from James Grenning's 2002 paper and later Mike Cohn's book on agile estimating. Scrum poker is the name people use when they run it inside a Scrum team, and pointing poker is the name that follows from estimating in story points. If you are searching for a tool, any of the three terms leads to the same kind of product: a shared room where a team votes on cards.

Playing it online with Spooky Planning

Spooky Planning is a free planning poker tool that runs in the browser, with no install. To start, you can sign in as a guest with just a name, or use an email magic link.

  • A room per team. Create a room, choose a scale, and share the room URL. The URL is permanent, so the same room works next sprint.
  • Hidden until everyone has voted. Cards show as face down once voted, and flip together when the votes are revealed. Auto-reveal can do this for you as soon as every voting player has voted.
  • Results that help the discussion. After a reveal, the room shows the average, the number of votes and the agreement level, and keeps them in the room history.
  • Viewer mode. A facilitator or product owner can take part without voting, and still undo a reveal or start the next round.
  • Hidden keyboard voting. Players can vote by pressing the letter shown under a card, which is useful when someone shares their screen and a click would give their estimate away.
  • Your own scales. Fibonacci, Modified Fibonacci, T-shirt sizes and Powers of Two are built in, and you can create your own.

Next steps