> talking about how hard something's going to be. The planning meeting isn't the right place to review the implementation approach of every story. That's best

> talking about how hard something's going to be. The planning meeting isn't the right place to review the implementation approach of every story. That's best left to another discussion among the technical team, probably in a design review.[1] Discussion isn't necessary for estimation purposes when the team agrees on effort. It's only necessary when the team can't agree where to rank the story's effort in relation to other stories, both completed and upcoming. (You need completed stories in there to "anchor" the story points, otherwise the meaning of a point will drift from iteration to iteration.) Once the team has ranked most stories, the team can return to those that they can't rank, and discuss them a little further until they can fit them into the rankings. [1] It could be that the team isn't communicating enough, and that the planning meeting is the only time they're forced to communicate.