Hours estimation with Sprint Poker
The start card opens with a custom hours deck filled in: 1, 2, 4, 8, 12, 16, 24 and 40 hours, plus ? and coffee. Custom decks are part of Pro ($29 once), so starting with it asks you to unlock Pro. To stay free, pick the powers of 2 deck instead: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 work as hours too. Either way the room comes with five sprint tasks, and each reveal gives the average and median.
- Check the cards on the start card. The Pro hours deck steps from 1 to 40 hours; edit the field (comma separated, up to 20 cards) if your team uses half days or a different ceiling.
- To stay on the free plan, choose "Powers of 2" in the Deck menu: 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 hours, plus ? and coffee.
- Type your name and press Enter. The room is created with your deck and five sample tasks; replace them by pasting the tasks from your sprint board, one per line.
- Agree what the hours include before voting: coding only, or also review, testing and deployment. Then vote and press R: the reveal shows the average, median, minimum and maximum in hours.
- Settle on a value and press N. At the end copy the summary as text, or with Pro export the session as CSV to add the hours to your tasks.
What to know
Planning poker was designed for relative story points, but plenty of teams estimate sprint tasks, client quotes or support work in hours, and the game helps just as much there: hidden votes stop the first person to speak from anchoring everyone else. Keep the cards spaced out, roughly doubling, because nobody can tell a 6-hour task from a 7-hour one in advance. That is why the free powers of 2 deck works well for hours: 1, 2, 4, 8 and 16 cover a task from an hour to two days.
Cap the deck. A card of 40 hours means a full working week, and a task that big should usually be split into pieces someone can finish in a day or two. Many teams keep 40 only as a signal that the task needs breaking down, and use ? when the description is too vague to estimate. With the powers of 2 deck, treat 32 and 64 the same way.
Write down what an hour covers. If one developer counts coding time and another includes review, QA and deploy, a 4 and a 12 can both be right. A short line in the first story, such as "estimates include review and tests", removes most of that disagreement.
When the reveal shows a wide spread, the median is usually a better pick than the average, because one very high vote drags the average up. Sprint Poker shows both after each round and names who voted lowest and highest, so you can hear their reasons before settling.
Updated · Cosmovex
Questions
Is the hours deck free?
The editable 1 to 40 hours deck is a custom deck, which is part of Pro ($29 once for the facilitator). The powers of 2 deck (0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64) is free and works as an hours scale.
Can I change the hour values?
With Pro, yes: edit the cards field on the start card, or later in the room settings. A deck can have 2 to 20 cards of up to 8 characters each. On the free plan you choose between the four built-in decks.
Can I use decimals like 0.5 hours?
In a Pro custom deck, yes: type 0.5 as a card and it counts as half an hour in the average and median. Avoid units such as "4h" on the cards: those count as labels, not numbers.
Should we estimate in hours or story points?
Hours suit short tasks the team understands well, client quotes and time-boxed work. Story points suit stories with uncertainty, where comparing sizes is easier than predicting time. Some teams use points for stories and hours for the tasks inside them.
Does the deck stay for the next session?
It stays in that room while the room exists: a free room is deleted 7 days after last use, a Pro room after 90 days. With Pro you can also save the hours deck to your team so every new room can use it.
The free plan covers everything on this page. Sprint Poker Pro ($29, paid once) is described on the Sprint Poker page.
