How a planning session works

Planning poker in SprintBee is one small loop repeated: pick an item, talk about it, vote privately, reveal together, accept a number. Everything else — decks, timers, queues, sessions — exists to make that loop cheap enough to run twenty times in an hour.

This page explains how the pieces fit. The pages beneath it are the ones with the buttons in them.

Where this page's older sections moved#

This page replaces the old Voting & decks and Managing a room pages.

What you were looking for	Where it lives now
Decks, the timer, reveal and change-vote rules	Set up a room before the meeting
Moderator, estimator and viewer roles; the Participants tab	Roles and participants
Voting windows and async estimation	Estimate asynchronously
Room codes, passwords, who can join	Control who can join a room
Writing an accepted estimate back to Jira	Write estimates back to Jira
Moderator keyboard shortcuts	Keyboard shortcuts
The queue, sessions, history and CSV export	Summarised below, in the queue and what a session leaves behind

Workspace, room, session, round#

Four nested things, from longest-lived to shortest:

A workspace is the team container. It owns a planning room, optionally a retro room, its members, and its integrations. A room is the durable planning space inside it: the same URL and room code every sprint, holding the deck, the voting rules and the backlog you have not estimated yet. A session is one meeting's worth of results — a name you can hang completed rounds on. A round is one work item being estimated.

Nothing in the room is disposable. Closing a session does not empty the queue, and leaving the room does not end anything.

What one round looks like#

A moderator makes an item active. Everyone reads it, asks questions, then picks a card from their hand. Votes stay hidden from everyone else — that is the whole point, since the first number said out loud otherwise anchors the rest of the room. You can change or retract your card freely before the reveal.

The reveal happens when the moderator chooses Reveal now, when every eligible participant has voted, or when a timer runs out with auto-reveal on. Votes then group into columns by value, under an honest read of the spread: unanimous, strong agreement when everyone landed within a step of each other, or a wide spread flagged as worth the conversation, naming a voter at each end.

Only a moderator accepts. The Accept button starts on the leading value and can be stepped to an adjacent deck value first, so a room can round up or down deliberately. Rooms that estimate Dev and QA separately accept a value for each. Accepting closes the round into history and, if the room's work-item source is set up for it, writes the number back to the linked Jira or Linear issue.

If the discussion changed everyone's mind, Re-vote clears the cast votes and runs the same item again without recording anything.

What the moderator decides in advance#

Room settings shape every round in the room: the deck, whether voting opens immediately or on the moderator's word, whether a countdown timer runs, whether votes hide until reveal or appear live, whether votes can change after the reveal, and whether Dev and QA are estimated separately.

Six decks ship built in — Fibonacci, Modified Fibonacci (the default), T-Shirt Size, Powers of Two, Sequential and Hours — and any of them can be edited into a custom deck of up to 15 cards, each at most four characters. The same defaults can be set once on the workspace so new rooms start the way your team works.

Work comes from a queue the room owns#

Items live in the room's queue, not in a session, so a backlog you loaded on Monday is still there on Thursday. Add work items takes a typed title and description from anyone in the room; when the workspace has a Jira or Linear source connected, moderators can search and import issues directly, and everyone else can paste keys or URLs for a moderator to approve.

Manage queue opens the board: To estimate on the left, Done on the right. From there a moderator can edit an item, reorder the queue, remove something, or split an item that turned out to be too big.

What a finished session leaves behind#

Complete session closes the current session and opens a fresh one. Queued items stay exactly where they are — only the results are grouped and set aside.

Each completed round keeps its accepted estimate and every vote cast, grouped by role, and a moderator can send a finished item back for another round from there. Browsing earlier closed sessions is moderator-only and paid, resolved from the plan of the account that owns the room. Export CSV is also moderator-only, and downloads every completed round in the room — title, accepted Dev, QA and team estimates, and the completion timestamp.

Live in a meeting, or not#

Everything above assumes a live room. It does not have to be. A moderator can open an async voting window instead, and the team votes on its own schedule; the meeting then only has to cover the items that failed to converge. A room can have one open window at a time, and opening one is free on every plan.