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Need to get aligned on your work?
Struggling to size your projects?
Run a Sprint Poker meeting to get your team on the same page about the scope of your projects and the effort required to complete them.
Sprint Poker estimation helps your team to:
And it makes your agile estimation fun and interactive with a digital deck of cards!
Let’s take a look at how it works.
Parabol’s Sprint Poker meeting format lets teams estimate stories together remotely, transforming a tedious task into an engaging experience.
Sprint Poker takes the burden off facilitators by pulling in stories directly from Jira and syncing estimates back again.
Built-in icebreakers help you connect before the meeting and each meeting ends with an auto-generated summary of your estimates, keeping the whole team up to date.
Parabol’s Sprint Poker meetings are split into five phases:
1. Icebreaker | build awareness of teammates’ personal context |
2. Scope | pull stories from Jira/Parabol and decide which to estimate |
3. Estimate | vote together on estimated effort using an interactive deck of cards |
4. Discuss | build a common understanding of estimated effort and sync estimates back to Jira |
5. Meeting Summary | get an automatic summary of your meeting delivered right to your mailbox |
Let’s start our tour in the meeting lobby.
You’ve gathered your team together and it’s time to start the meeting.
Anyone can press the Start Meeting button and take the facilitator role if they’re up to the task!
Use the arrows to cycle through Retrospective and Check-In meetings and select a Sprint Poker meeting.
Next up, you want to choose which estimation format and estimation scale to use:
Estimation Methods
Estimation Scales
Can’t see anything that tickles your fancy?
Create your own scale with our custom builder.
As the Facilitator advances the meeting, each teammate is given an opportunity to answer a randomized Icebreaker for the meeting.
What it sounds like: If the Icebreaker is, “What has your attention today?” responses might be:
“I’ve got a sick kid at home, I might have to stay on Mute”, or
“I’m on deadline, I’m really frazzled today”, or
“I’m excited for my anniversary dinner plans tonight.”
Now’s the time to decide which stories or tasks you want to estimate in your meeting.
You can pull these in directly from Jira or from your kanban board in Parabol.
The scoping process can be done asynchronously by the facilitator ahead of your meeting, or you might discuss which stories to estimate as a team.
With a couple of clicks, connect your Jira account and select the stories to import into Parabol.
The stories you select will flow directly into your meeting agenda so you can vote on each story as a team.
At this stage, the facilitator can talk through the reasoning behind their story selection as they go along, giving the team useful context.
What it sounds like:
“We need to start working on the new app next sprint, so I’m selecting a few of the highest priority stories for estimation”
When you move into the estimate phase, you’ll see all of your imported stories listed on the left-hand agenda.
You’ll go one-by-one through each story, with the title of the current story at the top. This will drop down to show you the description of the story you are estimating.
Depending on what template you’ve chosen, you’ll be selecting from the interactive card deck to estimate effort, value or something else:
If you have questions about a story, use the question card. If you don’t have enough information to make an educated vote, use the pass card. You can also add questions and comments in the thread as you consider your vote.
Should you need to amend your estimate, simply pick another card from the deck.
The facilitator or story author should give a short summary of each story before the team vote.
Team members may also wish to ask clarifying questions before voting.
What it sounds like:
“This story is about the new pay later feature we will launch. Users should be able to press a button at checkout to pay later”
“I have a clarifying question – does this story cover just the site or the app as well?”
The Facilitator can now reveal the team’s estimates by pressing the “reveal votes” button.
Your team may choose to only spend time discussing stories where there is a large variance in estimates.
Use the threaded discussion function to record your thoughts for posterity or to hold your discussion asynchronously.
After everyone has cast their estimates, the facilitator should reveal votes and review the variance.
Estimates are aligned: In cases where everyone is aligned, the facilitator can fill in the final estimate and move on to the next story.
Estimates are varied: Where there is a large variance in estimates, the facilitator should launch a discussion – first asking the extremities (highest and lowest) to explain their positions.
Facilitators might ask the team member with the highest and lowest scores to speak first.
What it sounds like:
“I can see we’ve all voted a 5 for this story. This one doesn’t seem controversial so I’ll set 5 as our final estimate”“We’ve got some differences here. Marie has given this story a 5 and Adam has given it a 21. Adam, perhaps you can start us off with some of your thoughts?”
When you’ve landed on a final estimate, the facilitator can click on that card or enter the value in the box. These estimates will sync back to Jira immediately.
The closing screen of the Sprint Poker meeting is a simple Summary of who attended, what stories were discussed, and the final estimate vote confirmed by the facilitator.
When you’ve finished estimating and discussing all the stories in your queue, the facilitator hits the “End Meeting” button to wrap things up.
Parabol will automatically generate a meeting summary, including all the issues you discussed and their estimates, and send a copy to all of your teammates, including any who were unable to attend.
These emails are a simple, informative artifact of a team’s progress, which can be saved or forwarded to any interested stakeholders.
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