What Is Planning Poker?

Planning Poker (also called Scrum Poker) is a consensus-based technique that agile teams use to estimate the relative effort or size of work items - typically user stories or backlog items - before a sprint or release begins.

Instead of a single person (a lead, a manager, or the loudest voice in the room) declaring how big a piece of work is, every member of the team estimates independently and privately at the same time. Estimates are only revealed once everyone has committed to a value, which prevents early guesses from anchoring - or biasing - everyone else's thinking.

The technique gets its name from the "cards" participants choose from. Rather than an exact number of hours or days, teams estimate in relative units - most commonly a Fibonacci-like sequence (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…) - because the growing gaps between numbers reflect how much harder it is to be precise about larger, less well-understood work. This app also supports entering any exact numeric value directly, alongside two special cards:

• Infinity - "this is too large or too poorly understood to estimate as-is; it needs to be broken down first."
• Pass - "I don't have enough context to give a meaningful estimate on this one."

Planning Poker was popularised in the early 2000s by James Grenning and later described in detail by Mike Cohn, and it has since become one of the most widely used estimation practices across Scrum, Kanban, and other agile methods.