What happens in a Planning Poker session?

Owned by Claudio Cossio (Unlicensed)
Last updated: Mar 22, 2018
2 min read

Planning Poker ® is an agile estimating technique which has become very popular in the last few years. It is mainly used by Agile & Scrum developers so the whole team can estimate the effort needed to build software products.

Step-by-step guide

These are the rules to play Planning Poker*:

  1. Each participant gets a deck of estimation cards representing a sequence of numbers. In Planning Poker for Hangouts we have 4 type of cards: the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, etc.), Days (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 15), T-shirt size (Small - Medium - Large - Xlarge) and a simple Yes/NO card set.
  2. The moderator presents one user story at a time to the team. This is called a Round.
  3. The Scrum Master or Product Owner (or an equivalent role) answers any questions the team might have about the story.
  4. Each participant privately selects a card representing his or her estimate of the “size” for the user story. Usually size represents a value taking into account time, risk, complexity and any other relevant factors.
  5. When everybody is ready with an estimate, all cards are presented simultaneously.
  6. If there is consensus on a particular number then the size is recorded and the team moves to the next story.
  7. In the (very likely) event that the estimates differ, the high and low estimators defend their estimates to the rest of the team.
  8. The group briefly debates the arguments.
  9. A new round of estimation is made (steps 4 and 5 above).
  10. Continue until consensus has been reached and the moderator records the estimate.
  11. Repeat for each story.


*Planining Poker ® is a registered trademark of Mountain Goat Software, LLC