Tutorial
Run a planning poker session
Estimate story points live with the team — no second tool: start the session, vote hidden, reveal, adopt.
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Planning poker lives on everyone estimating at once, uninfluenced — and dies on the results being typed by hand from a poker app into the board. In Zuuna the two are one: you estimate live, and adopting writes straight to the card. Poker belongs to the Developer plan.
What you need
- The Developer plan — see pricing.
- The poker.moderate permission to run it; voters need poker.join.
- Prepared cards — ideally fresh from refinement.
1. Check plan and permissions
Worth knowing before you share the link around: the invite link is just a link. It grants no permission — anyone who should vote needs poker.join in the group. The link opens the door only for people who already hold a key.
2. Prepare the card list
The default list is right for most sessions: cards that are ready for poker, have no points yet, bugs hidden (they need no estimate). Recurring selections can be saved as a shared list the whole team sees.
3. Start the session and invite people
Start the session and share the link. Anyone joining sees the current card and the state of the round — latecomers too: the round state is computed from the deadline, so a reload or a late join always shows the correct state, never accidentally revealed votes.
4. Start a round
Open the first card and start the round. The timer comes from the group's sprint settings (default: 10 seconds). Short is deliberate — the first intuition is usually the honest number, and long thinking time produces tactical votes.
5. Reveal and discuss
Until the reveal nobody sees anyone else's vote. Afterwards, only one conversation matters: the one between the lowest and the highest number. Usually one person knows something the other does not — that knowledge is the real yield of the round, not the number.
6. Adopt or discard
If you agree, adopt the value: it is written to the card as story points, and the card becomes ready for the sprint. No agreement? Vote again — or send the card back to refinement if the discussion showed it is still too vague.
7. Adjust deck and timer
The estimation scale (Fibonacci or custom) and round length live in the group's sprint settings — shared between poker and the backlog, so two scales never live side by side.
Troubleshooting
- Someone cannot get in via the link. The link grants no rights — the person lacks
poker.join. - The list is empty. The default list shows only ready cards without points. Run refinement first.
- The moderator has to leave. Hand over co-moderation — valid for that session.
- Everyone always votes the same. Then the voting is probably agreement, not estimation. Vote first, talk after — not the other way round.
Next steps
- Plan and start a sprint — schedule the ready cards.
- Use the backlog refinement board.
- Zuuna vs Jira — poker built in rather than a marketplace app.
FAQ
Do I need a second tool for planning poker?
No. Poker is built into Zuuna and writes the adopted estimate straight onto the card — no copying numbers from a poker app back into the board.
Which card values are there?
The group's estimation scale — Fibonacci or your own values. It is the same scale the backlog uses, set in the sprint settings.
Can others see my vote before the reveal?
No. That is the whole point of the method: hidden voting stops everyone anchoring on the first loud number.
Can someone else take over the session?
Yes — via co-moderation, for that one session. Handing over permanently goes through the poker.moderate permission.
What happens after adopting?
The points are written to the card and the card counts as ready for the sprint — it appears in the “ready for sprint” tab.