Estimation · CHIPS

Six ways to size work

Pick the technique per story, not per tool.

Switch technique in the middle of a session. The demo's four sprints use five of them, so you can open a round of each and see how it was decided.

Planning poker

0 ½ 1 2 3 5 8 13 20 40 100

The classic: everyone votes at once, discuss the outliers, vote again.

Fibonacci

0 1 2 3 5 8 13 21 34 55 89

A pure Fibonacci deck for teams that prefer the strict sequence.

T-shirt sizing

XS S M L XL XXL

Coarse sizing for roadmaps and early backlogs.

Three-point

(O + 4M + P) ÷ 6

Optimistic, most likely and pessimistic, combined into a PERT estimate.

Affinity

drag · drop · size

Sort a whole backlog into columns together, then size the columns.

Custom deck

1 2 4 8 16 · 🐜 🐭 🐶 🐘

Hours, risk levels or emoji. Saved for your other rooms; number decks get averages.

A voting round

Vote, reveal, discuss, agree.

The scrum master starts a story; everyone picks a card on their own screen. When the cards are revealed, CHIPS shows the distribution, the median and a suggested estimate, and rings every vote two or more cards away from the median.

An estimation room after the reveal: five votes, their distribution, the median and the suggested estimate — **In the demo:** the room of sprint 12 — the story's votes, the outlier ringed for discussion, the suggested estimate, and the team's capacity beside it.

Example from the demoAcross 53 rounds in four sprints, one of Dan's votes — a 13 — is flagged as far from the rest, with a note asking him why. The room's notes and the history keep that conversation with the story.

Run the meeting

Every control a facilitator reaches for.

The scrum master runs the room, or hands it to a moderator who needs no account. Stakeholders can watch without voting.

Moderators and watchers

Hand the session to a moderator; product owners watch without a vote.

Voting timer

A countdown per vote, 30 seconds to 5 minutes, with reveal when time is up.

Pass card

“?” means pass: counted as voted, left out of averages and consensus.

Anonymous voting

Cards without names, also in history, downloads and recordings.

Outliers

Votes two or more cards from the median are ringed: “ask them to explain”.

Fair averages

Suggest from the mean, median, mode, or the mean without the extremes.

Lock, remove, hide

Lock the room, remove someone, or hide the story points from the team.

Emoji reactions

👍 🎉 🤔 next to each name for ten seconds, without derailing the talk.

Big backlogs and big stories

Size a whole backlog, split the big ones.

Affinity estimation: everyone drags cards at once into size columns, and moves appear live for the whole room.
Epics: size the whole roughly, then split it in one step into equal parts, SPIDR, workflow steps, create / read / update / delete, or your own list.
The parts appear under the epic with their total next to the trunk estimate; estimates above a size you choose prompt a split.

Affinity estimation board with stories sorted into size columns — **In the demo:** the last three stories of sprint 10 were sized on an affinity board. “Checkout redesign” was estimated as a whole at 21 points, then split into four stories.

Record and replay Team and Enterprise

Replay a session step by step.

Every vote, reveal, discussion and final estimate of a recorded session, on a timeline. Useful for people who missed the meeting and for retrospectives. Every action is also in the activity log.

Playback of a recorded estimation session with a timeline — **In the demo:** “estimating the first stories” — three rounds of sprint 12, recorded, to play back at any speed.

On any device

Works on the phone in everyone's pocket.

No app, no plug-in: a modern browser is enough.
Light and dark themes, eight accent colors, larger text and reduced motion.
26 help topics with search and flowcharts, and a description on every button.

The CHIPS help centre with topics and a flowchart — The help centre: a flowchart of a voting round.

Estimate together. Agree faster.