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Scrum Poker

Scrum Poker Online — Sprint Planning Made Simple

Scrum poker is the estimation technique that keeps sprint planning honest and bias-free. EstiVote makes running scrum poker sessions online instant — share a link in Slack and you're voting in seconds.

What Is Scrum Poker?

Scrum poker is a structured estimation game played during sprint planning or backlog refinement. The name is a mashup of "scrum" (the agile framework most teams use) and "poker" (the hidden-vote mechanic borrowed from card games). It is identical to planning poker in method and purpose.

The game works by having each team member privately select a card that represents their estimate of a backlog item's relative effort or complexity. All cards are revealed simultaneously, forcing independent thinking rather than group consensus. When estimates differ significantly, the team discusses their reasoning — especially the person with the highest and lowest estimate — and re-votes until they converge.

Scrum Poker in Sprint Ceremonies

Scrum poker fits naturally into two recurring scrum ceremonies:

  • Sprint planning. The team estimates stories that are candidates for the next sprint. With story point estimates in hand, the team can compare total estimated effort against their historical velocity and commit to a realistic sprint goal.
  • Backlog refinement (or grooming). The product owner and team walk through upcoming backlog items, clarify acceptance criteria, and estimate effort before they reach sprint planning. Pre-refined stories with agreed estimates dramatically speed up sprint planning itself.

Some teams also use scrum poker ad hoc — to estimate a large technical task, a spike, or an unplanned piece of work that needs sizing before it can be prioritised.

Scrum Poker vs. Planning Poker: Is There a Difference?

No. The two terms are used interchangeably by practitioners and vendors. "Planning poker" is the original term from James Grenning's 2002 white paper; "scrum poker" emerged as scrum became the dominant agile framework. If your team searches for "scrum poker tool" and another team searches for "planning poker tool," they are looking for exactly the same thing.

Other synonyms you might encounter: pointing poker, story point poker, and agile poker. All refer to the same hidden-vote, simultaneous-reveal estimation technique.

Scrum Poker Card Decks

The card values your team uses affect how estimates cluster and how discussions unfold:

  • Fibonacci (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ?) — the most widely used deck. The widening gaps at higher values make it easier to express that a 13-point story is meaningfully harder than an 8 without false precision. Recommended as a starting point for most teams.
  • T-shirt sizes (XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL) — good for early backlog triage when stories are rough and absolute sizing would be premature. Less useful for velocity calculation.
  • Hours (0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 24, 40) — favoured by teams that track actual time rather than story points. Useful when stakeholders need time-based forecasts.
  • Powers of two (1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64) — a faster, more decisive scale for teams that find Fibonacci debates unproductive.

EstiVote supports all of these plus custom decks with any values your team prefers.

Frequently Asked Questions

Scrum poker (also called planning poker or pointing poker) is a consensus-based agile estimation game. Each team member privately selects a card representing their effort estimate for a user story, then all cards are revealed simultaneously. The discussion that follows — particularly around the highest and lowest estimates — is where alignment and shared understanding emerge.

There is no meaningful difference — scrum poker and planning poker refer to the same technique. "Planning poker" is the original name from James Grenning's 2002 paper; "scrum poker" became a popular alternative because most teams that use it work in scrum. Both terms describe the same process of private voting with simultaneous reveal.

Scrum poker is typically run during sprint planning or backlog refinement. The product owner or scrum master reads a user story, the team asks clarifying questions, then everyone casts a private vote. After reveal, the team discusses the spread and may re-vote. This continues until consensus is reached before moving to the next story.

The Fibonacci deck uses the Fibonacci sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…) as card values. The intentional gaps between higher numbers reflect the growing uncertainty of larger tasks — a 13-point story is meaningfully more uncertain than an 8, without any false precision. Most scrum teams use Fibonacci as their default deck.

Yes, and that simultaneity is the point. Scrum poker requires everyone to commit to a card before any votes are revealed. This prevents anchoring — if one senior engineer says "5" before everyone else votes, junior team members tend to adjust their estimates toward that anchor rather than thinking independently.

A well-run session takes 60–90 minutes to estimate a sprint's worth of stories (typically 8–15 stories depending on team size). Stories that require more than two voting rounds usually signal that acceptance criteria need clarification before estimation can proceed accurately.

Related guides
Planning Poker Online
Run planning poker in any browser, free.
What is Planning Poker?
The full guide to the technique and its rules.
Fibonacci Planning Poker
Why agile teams use the Fibonacci scale.

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