Silent Estimation by Smart Guess allows teams to estimate large number of stories faster

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Explore the efficient Silent Grouping method introduced by Ken Power for Agile user story estimation. Learn when to use Silent Grouping vs. Planning Poker for effective backlog refinement and sprint planning. This article also guides you through running your first Silent Grouping meeting with your team using Smart Guess.

## Key value of Silent Grouping

 **1. Increases Efficiency:**
- Speeds up the estimation process by eliminating lengthy debates or discussions before initial estimates are provided.
- Focuses discussions on discrepancies or significant variances after the silent phase.

**2. Reduces Bias and Groupthink:**
- Ensures that individual estimations are not swayed by the opinions or confidence of more vocal team members.
- Encourages independent thought, which often results in more accurate and diverse estimates.

**3. Fosters Inclusivity:**
- Provides a platform for quieter or less confident team members to contribute their perspectives without being overshadowed by louder voices.
	
**4. Enhances Accuracy:**
- Leverages a diverse set of individual insights to arrive at a more balanced and well-informed collective estimate.
- Highlights outliers and fosters meaningful conversations where estimates diverge significantly.
	
**5. Encourages Critical Thinking:**
- Team members must rely on their own understanding and analysis rather than deferring to others, promoting a deeper engagement with the task at hand.

## When to use Silent Grouping?
When teams start a new project or feature, estimating many stories using Planning Poker takes time. It takes time because teams often end up in a detailed discussion for each story, which is perfect when development is about to start but is not needed for stories further away.

With Silent Grouping, teams naturally focus on the relative size of each story compared to others rather than diving into details for one story, leaving detailed discussions for later. This allows teams to move considerably faster, perfect for long-term planning.

## When to use Planning Poker?
With Planning Poker, the discussions that take place are ideal for assessing what to implement during upcoming sprints. Because before starting work on a user story, a common understanding of what you plan on having ready when you finish the sprint is essential. For this reason, you must discuss and decide how to implement the user story and how much time to invest. There are always tradeoffs where the team and, ultimately, the product manager need to weigh the value vs. the cost of different implementation options, such as:
- Simple and quick - 2 story points 
- Better, yet not perfect - 5 story points
- Fancy pansy - 20 story points

The Planning Poker method clarifies how much effort the product manager is willing to invest relative to everything the team can spend their time on. So many teams use Planning Poker during refinement meetings to clarify what to build during the upcoming sprint(s).



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## Balancing how deep your story discussion goes
So it’s a balancing act of how deep you go with each story discussion. Stories you will soon start working on are smaller and need more clarity and a deeper discussion. Planning Poker is the perfect tool for this case.

However, for stories further away on the backlog that will be further broken down later, focus the discussion on what you know today and note down key areas of uncertainty to clarify. Bucket Estimation is perfect for this case.  


## How to run your first Silent Grouping meeting with your team?

Here is an article that walks you through the step-by-step process of [how to run your first Silent Grouping meeting with your team](https://smartguess.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/SOL/pages/738656257/Silent+Estimation).

Silent Grouping now available for Jira users


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