Vote Statistics & Outliers

After votes are revealed, EstimateQuest provides a statistical breakdown to help the team reach consensus.

Statistics

Metric	What it tells you
Average	The mean of all numeric votes — a general sense of the team’s thinking
Median	The middle value — less affected by extreme outliers than the average
Mode	The most common vote — what the majority agreed on
Standard Deviation	How spread out the votes are — lower means more agreement

Reading the Statistics

Low standard deviation (e.g., 0.5) → strong consensus, the team agrees
High standard deviation (e.g., 4.0+) → significant disagreement, discussion needed
Average ≈ Median ≈ Mode → the team is well-aligned
Average ≠ Median → outliers are pulling the average in one direction

Outlier Detection

Votes that deviate significantly from the group average are highlighted as outliers in the summary. This automatic detection draws attention to estimates that warrant discussion.

Why Outliers Matter

Outliers are the most valuable part of Planning Poker:

A high outlier might see hidden complexity others missed
A low outlier might have a simpler approach the team hasn’t considered
Either way, the discussion that follows improves the team’s shared understanding

Special Card Handling

Card	Statistical Treatment
Numeric values (1, 2, 3, 5, etc.)	Included in all calculations
? (question mark)	Excluded — signals “need more info”
(coffee break)	Excluded — signals “need a break”
T-Shirt sizes (XS, S, M, etc.)	Treated as ordinal — median and mode are meaningful, average may not be

Per-Group Statistics

When a ticket is assigned to multiple groups, statistics are calculated separately for each group. This is important because frontend and backend teams may legitimately estimate differently — they’re estimating different work.

For how the moderator reviews and acts on these statistics, see Vote Summary & Statistics (Moderator Guide).