Overview
The new release brings many new improvements some small bugfixes. The most prominent new features is the ability to limit allowed moderators to rooms in Jira Cloud. Other features include the Micro and Mini poker which is an extension to the Jira Cloud user interface for more convenient voting. And certainly the concurrent external user join requests handling is much improved.
New Features
There are many new features introduced, so we’d be glad if you provide feedback and bug reports to our support page so that we can address any issues in a timely manner.
Moderators restriction
Now for Jira Cloud users we’ve provided an extension to the add-on configuration page to restrict moderators for a room to only certain Jira Cloud users. This way not any registered user can become a moderator, but only those who are allowed by the instance administrator.
The instance administrator can navigate to the configuration page of Scrumpy Poker from the Configure button in the manage plugins section.
The configuration page has a specific yellow toolbar to indicate that this is an administrative area. When you navigate to the Rooms tab, you’ll see the list of projects in the system. If your instance has many projects, the list can narrowed down with a search criteria as displayed in the screenshot below.
When you expand the project, you’ll see one or more tiles which define the available rooms in this project. There can be more than one room in a project – one room for the project itself and one room for each board in this project. The rooms may not exist yet since they might not have been used yet.
The tile color indicates the existence of the project room. A dark color indicates that the room was already created and used. A light color means the room is not there yet. Even if the room is not there though, you can set the allowed moderators for this room.
When there are no moderators allowed, this means any Jira user in this instance with access to Scrumpy Poker can become a moderator. To change this, you can add at least one person as a moderator. When the list of moderators is not empty, only the users in the list can be moderators. The Become Moderator button and the Star button in the user interface will disappear to users who are no longer allowed to become moderators.
The moderator is added from the + button in the right middle of the tiles. When the button is pressed, a small user selector dialog box pops up where you can search for users in the instance by name. Clicking on the listed user will close the selector and choose the user to be a moderator in the room. There can be many moderators in each room. No moderators means any instance user can be a moderator.
When a moderator has to be removed from the room, the small (x) button displayed as a badge to the user can be pressed.
Each tile has some real-time status badges showing information like the current status of the room (e.g. none, preparing, voting, summary), the number of participants and the number of stories that are scheduled for estimation.
The information is updated in the admin page in real time as users enter rooms and modify them.
Micro poker
The micro poker is a small section in the issue screen that allows you to schedule a ticket for estimation and even start the estimation if you’re the moderator. The micro poker section is convenient when you need to see all Jira ticket information and extra fields and still be able to quickly vote without too much hassle.
You can use the micro poker section to only prepare the room by adding issues to the top or the bottom of the list when in the advanced query section in Jira or you can use it for ad-hoc estimation of any ticket in the backlog or the current sprint without leaving the usual Jira screens.
The Micro Poker room is displayed when pressing the poker icon in the Issue Toolbar. Pressing the button is usually once per Jira issue, but Jira Cloud can adjust the behavior, show/hide the button and the section at its convenience while monitoring the usage of the feature.
If the Micro Poker section is visible in the issue screen, it will show a POKER NOW button. Pressing either the button or the poker icon in the issue toolbar will open the poker section with all its bells and whistles. The reason for having the explicit button in the section is to not generate excessive needless traffic. Nevertheless, Scrumpy Poker prepares everything in the background so that when you press the button the Micro Poker content is displayed immediately.
If you don’t want to see the Micro Poker for this ticket, you can hide it from the Jira interface (the three dots in the upper right corner of the section).
The following bullets describe the interface parts that are different from the usual full poker user interface.
1. Schedule/unschedule story for estimation. A scheduled story is visible in the main poker room. Extra options for scheduling on top or on bottom of the list of stories is also available (see below)
2. Number of stories scheduled for estimation in this room. This is the number of tickets in the planned stories list of the poker room.
3. Open extra compartment for voting. To start voting, you can either press the play button or open this extra compartment and select a card or move the slider if a free-scale voting is configured.
4. Switch between the available rooms in this project. There is usually more than one room per project – one for the project itself and a separate room for each project board.
5. Shows connected users to this room. This is the list of connected users and their vote status/votes depending on the room state.
Before the story is scheduled for estimation, there are some extra option about the scheduling of the story and the story itself as described in the following picture:
6. Issue estimation history. If the issue has been estimated in the last month and the planning session has not been yet deleted, the issue estimation history is shown. The history shows what is otherwise available in the left pane of the regular poker room, but specific to the currently selected issue.
7. Add to top of issue list. This will add the story on top of the stories list of the planning session.
8. Add to bottom of issue list. This will add the story on the bottom of the stories list of the planning session.
After the story is added, there is an extra button that helps with switching the card preset for the story:
9. Switch story preset. When you have at least one preset defined, you can assign it to this story.
When voting, you can lower down the list of cards (or free scale) with the down arrow button (10) as described in the screenshot below:
The Micro Poker section can be completely disabled for the whole instance from the configuration section of the add-on. Go to the Configure button and then on the main page, at the bottom check the Disable Micro Poker checkbox as described in the screenshot below:
Mini Poker
The Mini Poker section is a bit bigger than the Micro Poker and that’s why it’s named like that. It occupies bigger vertical space and the same toolbar and rules appear for the Mini Poker as with the Micro Poker.
The Mini Poker has most of the features available in the regular poker room with some exceptions (like the options for example, the vertical history button, list of issues planned, etc.). This view is more designed for ad-hoc voting from inside Jira rather than a separate dedicated session.
1. Switch Room. This button is used to switch between project and board rooms for this particular project
2. Show connected users. This button brings in the right pane from the regular planning poker to see who is online and who has voted.
The rest of the buttons are the same as the ones available either in the full poker room or the Micro Poker room.
The Micro Poker room can be disabled from the configuration section:
Switch Room
A new Switch Room button is available both in the context menu for the regular poker room as well as the bottom action line. It allows you to switch to another room for the current project. Each project maps to a room, so does each board from this project. A project with two boards maps to 3 rooms that can be switched using this button.
The button is also available from the bottom action line
When the Switch Room button is pressed, a room selector is displayed at the bottom of the screen:
Query issues that are scheduled for estimation
You can now execute a JQL from Jira advanced issue search to locate issues that have been scheduled for estimation.
The query above shows all issues that are scheduled in any room. The ‘name’ property actually contains a comma separated list of room identifiers.
To show the issues that have been estimated, you can use this query:
issue.property[room].name = “”
To show issues that have never been scheduled for estimation, you can use this query:
issue.property[room].name is empty
Enable/disable extra cards
Now it is possible to disable the extra cards (coffee, brownie, etc.). When all cards are disabled, the extra card disappears and voters won’t be able to vote with the funny cards again until enabled.
The extra cards can also be enabled/disabled per preset – e.g. to have extra cards in one ticket and no extra cards for another ticket.
Copy Jira link
Now it is possible to copy Jira link instead of the regular guest (external) link. This way there won’t be any questions for the moderator to accept external voters in case the user has Jira registration and is logged in.
Please use the Copy Jira link option when sending to users which are registered Jira users in your instance.
Fixed bugs
Multiple simultaneous join requests
There were some concurrency issues when more than one external person tried to join the room at the same time. Only the first one was let in. The concurrency issues have been solved and now multiple join requests can be handled by the same time by the moderator:
Estimate not rounded
When the result of voting resulted in more than one digit after the decimal point, it was not rounded in Jira.
Now this is fixed and the result 2.3 would be set in the story points field.
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!