Agile Story Pointing

Everyone on your team votes on task complexity

About Story Pointing

Story pointing is an Agile estimation technique where team members vote on the complexity and unknowns of a task or user story, rather than estimating implementation time directly.

Using This Site

This site facilitates the pointing process by providing a real-time voting interface that your team can use in refinement meetings. This site is free to use with any size team, it does not require any registration or payment.

  1. Create a room.
  2. Adjust the settings to your taste.
  3. Share the room URL with your team.
  4. Everyone who is voting needs to join the room and enter their name. Observers can join without entering a name and see all votes.
  5. As you discuss a story, everyone submits a story point vote.
  6. Discuss the votes and reach a consensus on the story's complexity.
  7. Record the story points in your project management tool or backlog.
  8. Clear the votes and move on to the next story.

Pointing rooms are temporary. Votes and room settings are deleted from the server after an hour of inactivity. Settings saved in the browser's recent room list will be restored by the first person to re-join the room.

Settings Guide

Saved settings will be applied for the current room and also saved by your browser to apply when creating future rooms.

Point Values

Configure the scale of points available for voting. Enter values separated by spaces. Common scales include the Fibonacci sequence (1 2 3 5 8 13) or simple increments (1 2 3 4 5 6). Scales with fractional values (0.5 1 2 3 8) are also supported.

Blind Voting

When enabled, votes are displayed as question marks until you vote. This prevents anchoring bias where seeing other votes influences your own estimate. Once you've submitted your vote, all votes are revealed.

Locked Voting

When enabled, votes are locked in, preventing team members from changing their estimates after submitting. When disabled, team members can change their vote after submitting to revise their estimate. You can toggle this setting at any point during the session. For example you might want to lock voting initially to encourage independent thinking, but later allow changes after discussion.

Averaging

Position: Averages the positions of votes within your point scale, then uses the point value at that position. For example, with scale 1 2 3 5 8, votes of 1 and 8 give 3 because it is halfway between them in position.

Value: Averages the numeric values of the votes directly. With the same votes (1 and 8), the average is 4.5, rounding to 5.

Both methods stay within your point scale, but Value tends to bias towards higher values when there are large vote differences on a Fibonacci scale.

Rounding

When calculating average points, this slider controls how fractional results are rounded. Move it left to bias towards rounding down, right to bias towards rounding up, or leave it in the middle for balanced rounding to the nearest value. This gives you fine-grained control over how rounding affects your estimates.

Clear All Votes

Clears all votes so that the group can move on to estimating a new story. This button is available in the Settings menu.