- Acceptance conditions
- The observable behavior or outcome that must be true before the team considers an item complete.
- Anchoring
- The tendency for people to be influenced by the first number or opinion they hear.
- Backlog refinement
- A recurring activity where the team clarifies upcoming work, splits large items, and prepares decisions for planning.
- Estimate
- A planning signal based on current understanding, not a guarantee of exact duration.
- Facilitator
- The person guiding the estimation session, revealing votes, resetting the room, and keeping discussion focused.
- Fibonacci-style scale
- A card sequence with widening gaps, useful when uncertainty grows as items become larger.
- Ordinal scale
- An evenly spaced card sequence for teams that want adjacent numerical choices.
- Planning poker
- A collaborative estimation technique where participants vote privately and reveal estimates simultaneously.
- Relative estimation
- Estimating by comparing work with other known items instead of predicting exact hours.
- Spike
- A time-boxed investigation used when a team needs information before estimating or implementing an item.
- Story splitting
- Breaking a broad work item into smaller, testable slices that are easier to discuss and estimate.
- Vote spread
- The distance between the lowest and highest selected cards after reveal. A wide spread usually means assumptions differ.
Glossary
Planning poker glossary.
Plain-language definitions for estimation terms used by agile teams.