Team

Affinity sizing

Sort a whole backlog into relative buckets in one pass, then put numbers on the buckets. Create a room, share the link, and everyone sorts on the same board. Rooms are ephemeral: no accounts, and everything is wiped after two hours of inactivity.

Start

Create a board and send the link to your team. Whoever opens it sorts the same pile of cards.

How a sizing pass works

Affinity sizing exists because estimating fifty stories one at a time burns a meeting. Planning poker is excellent for the story you are about to build and miserable for a backlog: a round per item, times fifty, is a whole afternoon. Affinity sizing flips the order. Sort everything by relative size first, put numbers on the groups second. Most of the argument disappears, because people are much better at saying "this one is bigger than that one" than at saying "this one is a five".

Someone pastes the backlog into the tray, one story per line. Then everyone sorts in silence: tap a card, tap a bucket, and it moves for everybody at once. Silence is the point. Nobody is explaining, defending or anchoring, so fifty cards land in buckets in a few minutes. If you think a card is in the wrong place, move it. You do not need permission and you do not need to say anything.

Cards that keep moving are the interesting ones. After a card has been pulled out of a bucket three times, the board marks it contested and lists it under Discuss. That list is your agenda: those are the stories where people genuinely see different work, which usually means a hidden assumption or a missing acceptance criterion, not a rounding error. Those are worth a proper planning poker round.

When the sorting settles, switch to the points phase. Each bucket header gets a value, seeded with 1, 2, 3, 5 and 8, and every card inherits its bucket's number. Nobody estimates a card individually. Copy the CSV into your tracker and the backlog is sized.

The technique comes from the agile community, where relative sizing exercises like this are a common alternative to item-by-item estimation. The variations have many names and no single author. The mechanics below are the version that survives contact with a remote team.

Frequently asked questions

Why is there no drag and drop?

Two reasons. Half the team is on a phone, where dragging a card across five columns is a fight. And when several people drag at once on a shared board, cards jump under your finger. Tapping a card and then tapping a bucket is one atomic move the server can order cleanly, and it works the same on every device.

What happens if two people move the same card?

The later move wins and everyone sees the same board. There is nothing to merge: the server handles one message at a time, so the move order is never ambiguous. The card shows who moved it last, and the move is counted toward the contested marker.

Why five buckets and not the Fibonacci deck?

Because the sorting phase is about order, not arithmetic. Smallest to Largest is a relative scale, and five slots is about as many distinctions as a team can hold in their head while sorting quickly. The numbers arrive in the second phase, where you can put any point values you like on the five headers.

What counts as a contested card?

Leaving a bucket. The first placement out of the tray is just someone doing the initial sort, so it does not count. After that, every time a card is pulled out of a bucket the counter goes up, and at three it gets an amber pill and appears in the Discuss list.

Do my teammates need an account?

No. They open the invite link, type a name, and they are on the board. Nothing is stored server-side beyond the live room, which expires two hours after the last change.

Can I keep the result?

Copy as CSV puts every card on the clipboard with its bucket, its points and whether it was contested, ready to paste into a spreadsheet or a tracker import. Do it before you leave, because the room is deleted after two hours of inactivity.