Planning Poker
Tạo phòng, gửi link cho cả nhóm, mỗi người chọn một lá — bài chỉ lật khi chủ phòng lật, nên không ai bị neo theo con số của người bấm trước.
How it works
Planning poker is how a team sizes work without the first person to speak dragging everyone else toward their number. Each person plays a card face down, and the cards turn over together once everyone has chosen. What comes out is a set of independent judgements rather than an echo of whoever spoke first.
Story points are not hours. They measure relative size: an 8-point story is understood as roughly four times the size of a 2-point one, not as eight hours of work. That is why every deck thins out as it climbs — Fibonacci, powers of two — because precision falls away as size grows, and a deck offering both 20 and 21 only produces arguments that do not matter.
The value of the session is in the disagreement, not the number. When one person plays 2 and another plays 13, they are almost certainly imagining different pieces of work: one has not seen the migration, the other thinks an admin screen is included. That gap surfaces in thirty seconds instead of surfacing mid-sprint.
This tool works in rooms: one person creates a room and shares the link, everyone else joins through it. No account, no sign-up. The room lives for the meeting and then expires — nothing is kept afterwards beyond the list of stories you copy out yourself.
Worked example
One round with four people
- Story
- Add Google sign-in
- Cards played
- 3, 5, 5, 13
- Average
- 6.5
- Median
- 5
- Most played
- 5
- Spread
- 3 to 13 — three deck positions apart
Do not settle on 6.5. Whoever played 13 can see something the other three cannot, usually the handling of an account that already exists with the same email address. Hear them out and vote again; if the second round is still scattered, the story is too big and should be split.
Frequently asked questions
Why play face down? Would it not be quicker to just say a number?
Quicker, and worse. It is anchoring: the first number spoken pulls every later estimate toward it, whether or not the person who said it understands the work best. Hidden cards are the entire reason the method exists — remove them and the session is just asking whoever speaks first.
Can anyone see my card before the reveal?
No. While a round is open, the data the server sends to each browser says only who has voted, never what they played — the value is not in the payload. Opening developer tools shows nothing, because there is nothing there to show.
Which deck should we use?
Fibonacci is the sensible default for most teams. The t-shirt deck (XS to XXL) suits a team that is new to estimating and wants to avoid numbers feeling like commitments; in exchange it has no average, because the mean of S and XL is not a size. Powers of two suit teams who already think in doublings.
What are the "?" and coffee cards for?
"?" means there is not enough information to estimate — a valid answer, and often the most accurate one available. The coffee card asks for a break. Both count as having voted but are excluded from the statistics: folding a request for a break into an average is how it turns into a story point.
How many people can join one room?
Up to fifty. In practice a session with more than eight or nine people cannot hear everyone out, so fifty is a technical ceiling rather than a recommendation.
Do I lose the room if I reload the page?
No. Your browser remembers who you are in that room, so a reload or a brief drop in connection leaves your seat and your played card intact. A room only disappears after a few hours with nobody active in it.
What happens if the host leaves?
The host seat passes to the longest-serving person still connected, so a room never ends up in a state where nobody can reveal the cards.