Month: July 2020

Introduction

The new release contains some small but nice usability features and enhancements that our customers have recently requested. They have been in the backlog for quite some time, but due to the refactoring they have been pushed back. Now when Scrumpy’s core has been refactored to sustain the load, the new features are being implemented one by one.

New Features

Comments in asynchronous voting

Before, asynchronous voting was just setting the vote in advance by the team members and leaving it as is. The scrum masters had difficulties understanding the reasoning behind the votes.

Now it is a bit easier to get the idea why someone voted with a given vote – there is also an additional comment. Everything starts by setting the comments for asynchronous voting to required. This can be done from the room settings, just bellow the asynchronous voting checkbox. Certainly the asynchronous voting has to be checked to be able to use the require comments option.

After the require comments option has been enabled, when setting a vote in advance a new dialog box pops up.

The comment is a free text that will be useful to the scrum master (moderator) who will accept the votes and convert to estimate in the ticket.

Board local search

Before some customers wondered why all tickets are accessible and not only the tickets that are available under the selected board. Having access to tickets from other boards and projects can be convenient, but sometimes it is too much information that can be limited.

Now the tickets that are displayed in the search box can be limited only to the current board. This setting is available in the Integrations -> Jira setting

After the option is enabled, searching by ticket number or by JQL will yield only tickets from the current board.

Hide the average vote

Sometimes it is not nice to show the average vote since the voters are convinced that the average vote is the right vote and this might not be always the accurate estimate. Instead, it would be better to first discuss the chart displayed and only then to show the average vote after the consensus has been selected.

The feature is available in the core settings

Once enabled, the summary box won’t show the average vote. Instead it will show an alert message that to be able to complete the voting, the average vote should be shown.

After the discussion about the results, the average vote can be shown and the voting can be completed.

Override free-scale voting

Before it was not possible to override free-scale voting both in story points and in time. Now there is a slider after the vote completes so that the scrum master can override it.

Fixed Bugs

User avatar and name sometimes not automatically set in Jira Cloud

Sometimes opening the room didn’t automatically set the participant’s name and avatar and this had to be manually entered which was kind of awkward. This was a regression caused recently and it has been fixed now.

Days/Weeks/Months always visible

For free-scale time-based voting the scale switch was fully visible. Now the days/weeks/months buttons are hidden in case the scale won’t be able to stretch to this level.

Happy voting!

All those nice features (and fixed bugs) have been completed thanks to our users – they have requested and we have implemented them. Please help Scrumpy Planning Poker become even more convenient for you by submitting a feature request/bug to our Feature Requests page or up-vote an existing feature that you find useful. Thank you!

Introduction

It has been a while since we announced an official release. There have been multiple small updates and releases since then though. Scrumpy Poker was silently being substantially refactored in the background. New features have been frozen for some time for the sake of improving the stability and connectivity issues that we used to have.

Scrumpy grew significantly from just a few hundred users to tens of thousands recurring users from 1800+ companies actively using it. It has been a bumpy ride and quite a challenge to sustain our growth and still keep the product free of charge. Our user base spans from small software businesses to big enterprise and government organizations and many Fortune 500 companies. And it is not just about software – any task that can be estimated, any risk that can be assessed, any value that can be measured are the sweet spot of Scrumpy Poker. That’s why we achieved almost 20% MoM growth rate from companies trusting our solutions.

Welcome to the new Scrumpy Poker!

New Features

Asynchronous Voting

This feature request has collected quite some votes. It seems that even though voting is a collaborative process it still brings value to be able to estimate in advance and do either a smaller voting sessions with less participants or simply go over tickets and collect the votes that were added during the last few hours/days. That’s why the feature was renamed from Early Voting to Asynchronous Voting and has been extended as per the requirements that our users provided.

When the Asynchronous Voting is enabled, anyone can hop-in the room and add an estimate to the ticket from the context menu button at the right side of the ticket

After the stories are estimated, one option would be to just start voting with whoever is able to be online at the time of the session or just simply collect the results. The votes of the people who voted earlier are appearing in a separate section of the sessions screen.

And finally the most anticipated feature according to our feature requests – collecting the votes!

When pressing the donut button the regular summary box is popped up and the Scrum Master can adjust or just press the completion button to assign the story points or time to the ticket. This can be done without any voting session. The Scrum Master (a.k.a Moderator) can open the Planning Poker room and collect the asynchronous votes of all previously estimated stories.

Note: soon both real-time and asynchronous voting will be integrated inside the Jira Issue view. Stay tuned!

Volume control

You know this loud sound when the Moderator honks the horn to remind you to vote or just when voting has started. Sometimes it is too loud and intrusive. That’s why now by default the volume is set to 50% and there is volume control in the personal settings (yes, controlled individually by each user). You can still get the old style of sound if you pump up the volume to 100%. You can also make it very discrete, just enough to get a notification when on another browser page.

Import/export of room settings

When opening a new room on another project/board or just starting an ad-hoc room, the settings that you’re used to are gone. Instead the configuration starts from scratch including card presets and voting rules. This takes some time and can be annoying to adjust it again and again.

Now there is a new feature to export the room settings to a file and then import the settings to another room.

The downloaded file has a binary encrypted content so that any Slack webhooks or external API tokens are not visible.

The settings can be imported by dragging and dropping the binary file to the drop area or just clicking the drop area.

Reset room settings

When fiddling around settings something might go wrong and you could forget what was changed. There is a convenience shortcut now to reset the settings to their initial value.

The option is also convenient if you would like to wipe off all information in this room and make it completely empty right away. Scrumpy Poker would delete everything after one month of inactivity. With this shortcut this can be done immediately.

Clear search list

Before it was difficult to clear the list of tickets in Jira when the wrong query was used. Now there is a shortcut to clear the current search list so that the list can be started from scratch.

Room Description

A multi-line fixed-font description of the room is now available in the room settings. The description can serve for some additional instructions to the voters, mapping tables, or just a welcome message.

After the description is set, it appears below the stories/chat list as follows:

Bug Fixes

PWA Add To Home Screen was not available

Installing the PWA mobile application was temporarily not available. Now the PWA configuration has been fixed and the Add To Home Screen is available when shooting the QR code in the room.

Additional Channels

Service Desk/Support

We’ve added a service desk support system where you can file support tickets and watch for their implementation. The page is available at this location.

Status Page

Now you’ll be able to know for on-going or scheduled maintenance, incidents and health status of the system. The status page is available at this location.

SLA page

Now you’ll be able to monitor in real-time our up-time status. And this is not just the overall status but also our sub-system status. The system automatically smoke-tests the system for issues. The system can be found at this location.

Discussion forum

We’ll try to bring more life to our feature/support discussion forum. The forum is available at this location.

Happy voting!

All those nice features (and fixed bugs) have been completed thanks to our users – they have requested and we have implemented them. Please help Scrumpy Planning Poker become even more convenient for you by submitting a feature request/bug to our Feature Requests page or up-vote an existing feature that you find useful. Thank you!