Affinity sizing

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.

Six people, a backlog of forty-eight, twenty minutes booked. Somebody pastes the list and the tray fills. The silent sort at that size tends to settle inside ten minutes, and it lands somewhere like nine smallest, fourteen small, thirteen medium, eight large and four largest.

Switch to the points phase and the seeded values do the arithmetic for you. Nine at one, fourteen at two, thirteen at three, eight at five and four at eight comes to 148 points across the backlog. If the room then decides the largest bucket is really a thirteen, one dropdown moves the total to 168 and nobody has re-estimated a card. That is the property worth having: the relative order was the expensive part and it is already done, so the scale laid over it is cheap to change. It is also why arguing about numbers before the sorting is finished wastes the meeting.

The Discuss list is the second output and the one people forget to use. Three or four contested cards out of forty-eight is normal and amounts to about an agenda. A dozen means the buckets do not mean the same thing to everyone yet, and the room will get more out of ten minutes on what large means to it than out of carrying on sorting.

Copy as CSV writes four columns: title, bucket, points, contested. The bucket column carries the full word rather than the abbreviation on the card, a card still in the tray leaves the points column empty, and contested reads yes or no. A title containing a comma or a quotation mark is quoted properly, so the paste opens cleanly in a spreadsheet instead of sliding a column sideways.

Take that copy while people are still in the room. There is nothing to come back to afterwards, and the two hour idle timer counts from the last change anybody makes rather than from the moment the meeting ends.

A board holds a hundred cards and forty people. Paste a list longer than the space left and it fills to the cap, dropping the remainder quietly, so watch the counter in the Add stories header and split a very large backlog across two boards rather than assuming all of it arrived. Titles are cut at two hundred characters. A room code is six characters drawn from an alphabet with the easily confused ones left out, so there is no I, L, O, zero or one to misread over a call. The name you type is kept in this browser and shared with the other room tools here, which is why the next board you open already has it filled in.