Category: Support

Introduction

After quite some time of silence, we’re ready with a major new release. It addresses the pile of most important features requested. Below is a list of new features and bugfixes available in this release.

Note: If you experience issues, for example you cannot select stories as moderator, please fully reload the page (Shift + Reload browser button). This will ensure that all static resources are downloaded.

New Features

The new features are focused around more usablity with the collaboration editor, more intuitive interface for the asynchronous voting and Jira improvements.

Voting perspectives

The voting perspectives show a different estimation view on a ticket. In many cases it is needed to estimate tickets from different point of view, for example complexity of implementation, testing effort, business value, system risk, rank, etc. In the previous versions it was possible to estimate a ticket only from one point of view only. Now it is possible to create multiple voting perspectives and assign presets to them. This makes it possible for sequential estimation of the same story with a different method and update different fields for each perspective.

The perspectives are controlled directly from the story view and new perspectives can be added without going to the room settings. They are completely custom and ad-hoc and can be named in any convenient way. Each perspective has also a short description that can be edited in-place. The description is a good addition to the name to show the participants what they are voting for.

Note: It’s preferable to keep the perspective names short so that no horizontal scrolling is needed when switching perspectives.

The advantage of perspectives is that you can estimate one single story from multiple perspectives in one shot. In horizontal story flow when the regular estimation in story points is complete, the perspective is automatically switched and the next story from the new perspective is estimated. The process is repeated when estimation is complete.

Another option is to do switch to the vertical story flow. In this mode all stories from the regular perspective are estimated and when ready the next perspective is activated. When all stories from the new perspective are estimated the next one is activated and so on. This mode is convenient for teams that distribute the planning session for different groups of people who estimate only a particular perspective.

Each perspective can have a preset assigned to it. In this case, when a new story is added to the preset, the perspective preset is automatically assigned to the story. Since each preset can have a custom estimate field, this means that estimating a story in each perspective will update a different field. This allows estimating several fields both Numeric and Time of a story. You can certainly have different fields, different description fields, different estimation cards and modes per preset making the available combination for estimation able to fit any need.

A convenient way to populate the stories for all perspectives is row by row as if all stories are in a table. There is a context menu command that populates the same story in all perspectives automatically assigning the presets to it. The command is called ‘Clone story to all perspectives’.

When the estimation session starts, stories will be switched automatically and cards/estimation mode changed as the process flows. This way estimating a story from different perspectives becomes a smooth experience.

Example setup

First, lets leave the default perspective unchanged (it is unnamed, the first icon in the list of perspectives). It will estimate our story with story points as usual.

Let’s create a second perspective called Risk that updates a field called ‘Custom Number’. This is done by creating the Risk perspective from the ‘+’ button in the story list.

Next comes assigning a preset that stores estimation in numeric field ‘Custom Number’.

Set the ‘Custom Number’ (or whatever field you’re using) as estimation field.

Assign the Risk preset to the Risk perspective

Finally, create a third perspective called Time that will hold time estimate. This is done by creating the Time perspective from the ‘+’ button in the story list and assigning a preset that stores estimation as time, e.g. it has story point to time mapping. Let’s also enable free scale so that arbitrary time can be given.

Create a Time preset with time mapping and free scale voting

Assign the Time preset to the Time perspective

Note: For estimating with time, please either use the default perspective in case Time is the default board estimation in Jira or set the field ‘Time tracking’ as the estimate field for the Time preset. In the last case please make sure the ‘Time tracking’ is in the Jira edit screens for this issue type.

Now let’s add a story and clone it to all 3 perspectives (‘Clone to all perspectives’ button). When the voting session starts the cards and updated fields will vary according to the preset assigned to the perspective. In one shot the story will have 3 type of estimates.

Now when scrolling through the perspectives the same story looks different in each perspective.

Extra fields editing

Previously the Additional Information section in the collaboration view showed few static fields. This was not very convenient for more complex stories which requires the display of multiple fields, editing fields while voting for the story, etc. Now the it is possible to customise the list of fields displayed in a story based on the story preset and make it easy to change assignee, sprint, add labels and many more. Almost all fields that are visible in Jira can be displayed and the order and the list of fields that are displayed is completely customisable so that you can focus only on the essential information during the estimation.

By default, the room starts with no additional fields displayed. The list can be edited from the settings. There is a shortcut button though to quickly get you started.

After pressing the button for adding the most common fields, edit boxes for changing the issue type, assignee, labels, etc. are automatically added. If you’d like to customise the order and add other custom fields, this can be done from the settings. Certainly, instead of the default list of fields an individual setup can be created from scratch from the settings box. Each field configuration is specific to the current preset if such is created. Otherwise, as usual, the settings are changed globally for the room.

After the fields are configured, they will change as per their defined preset (if any) while scrolling through the scheduled stories for estimation.

Note: Some fields may not appear for certain issues. For example fields specific to Issue screens won’t be visible for Bugs. If you don’t see your field, even though you’ve added it in the settings page, please check if this field is displayable for this project and issue type.

Note: If you observe that a widget is not properly displaying or editing a custom field, please report that to us with enough information about the field type. We’d be happy to fix it in the next releases.

More description fields

So far only the description field was displayable and editable in the collaboration view. Now any multi-line field can be added to the collaboration view in the description section. Such fields are the Environment, Acceptance Criteria and others. They can be other plain text or rich text. The list of fields is controlled from the room settings and is specific to each preset (if defined). This allows switching to the right description fields when focusing on different types of stories or voting perspectives.

When the description fields are properly configured with Rich Text and Plain Text to fields that should be displayed, they will be shown in the collaboration view.

Note: Please use presets to assign specific description fields to specific issue types otherwise you may get empty text or errors when editing the descriptions.

Note: Please make sure you put Rich Text to description fields that support styling of text to avoid having strange HTML tags in the description when editing them both in Jira and in Scrumpy Poker.

Comments

With this release it is now possible to view comments in the collaboration view. The comments are displayed newest first and there is an expand button to show more. Usually the top 5 comments are enough to display in the ticket to get enough context, but more can be shown on request.

New comments can be added with the Add Comment button. The comments can contain rich text, e.g. can be formatted and styled as in Jira.

More intuitive asynchronous voting

So far asynchronous voting was a bit awkward as experience. The voting had to be done through a button at the right side of the story. This lead to mistakes as some time the voting was activated as a card was pressed instead of this button. Now this has been addressed and the asynchronous voting has 2 modes of operation.

Asynchronous voting mode

This is a new mode of operation. In this case nobody except the moderator can start the voting session. When pressing the voting cards the vote is marked and statistics for voting is collected. The moderator can always press a card to add his/hers vote to the issue or to press the donut icon to only accept the other participant’s votes.

This voting mode is suitable for completely asynchronous operation when there is a team in another time zone contributing with votes.

Collaboration voting mode

This is the old mode of operation. In this mode of operation anyone can start the voting when focusing on the currently selected story by the moderator. It is a normal voting mode with the slight difference that there are voting statistics who voted before and when the votes are accepted the currently participating users can see the votes of users who voted asynchronously.

Use cases

There are several use cases for using asynchronous voting. They depend on the availability of team members, time zone distribution, etc.

• Team doesn’t want to discuss votes. In this case Asynchronous Voting can be used. When the team members complete voting, the moderator will see which team members have already voted and just press the ‘donut’ button on each ticket to accept the estimate.

• Part of the team is in another time zone and cannot participate in the discussion of estimates. In this case part of the team members can vote in advance. The rest of the team members who can appear online can vote the usual way in collaboration mode contributing on top of the already given early votes. In this case the Collaboration Voting can be used and this mode can be switch right before starting the collaboration session to avoid incidental start of the voting by an early voter and allow early voting certainly. When this mode is switched, the early votes are available, but it is not possible for the moderator to just accept the votes. The currently online team members must vote as usual. The early votes will be added to the result.

Search filters

Jira has search filters that can be assigned to boards to make issue listing easier. Boards can share filters and also those filters can be used for some predefined queries to which the Jira users are used to.

Now those search filters are available in Scrumpy’s search box. The search filters are an easy shortcut to predefined JQL queries stored in the Jira instance.

The starred filters in Jira appear as ‘Favorite Jira filters’ in the filters search box. This is a shortcut to the favorite/started filters that are most frequently used in the Jira instance.

Min & Max range for free scale

Before the limit of the free scale was limited by the maximum value of all cards. Now this has changed there is an option to increase the maximum range or set a new min range with a couple of sliders in the room settings.

After the ‘Use free scale’ option is enabled for the room globally, or for a preset, there are 2 new edit boxes that allow the modification of the minimum and the maximum range of the free scale.

Tens Dice Fingers

So far the cards showed exponential complexity of stories that were estimated. Linear complexity estimation was possible through a customised T-Shirt card setup or through the free scale voting (slider). Now there is another option to use small-range easy to use set of cards.

The new card sets are selectable from the room settings. The card sets are available for the settings globally and for presets too.

Fingers

This is a way of estimating stories from 0 to 10. It is a digital representation of voters using no cards and instead using their fingers for voting.

Dice

Using dices it is possible to easily estimate stories linearly from 1-12. It is a digital representation of voters rolling dice for estimation.

Tens

In some cases it would be useful to measure complexity in percentage, say 0-100 roughly and then precisely adjust estimation in the summary dialog. Rough estimation by rounding (depending on the chosen averaging algorithm) is the default. Precise adjustments like 23% can be done if you enable the ‘Show numeric labels’ option in the settings dialog. This way in the summary dialog the team starts with the average unrounded and adjusts it precisely based on the discussion and team feedback.

Need more cards? Please let us know if you can’t find your favourite set of cards that you’d like to use.

Bugfixes

There are several minor bugfixes that made their way through this release.

Pin code in micro/mini poker

Before if you have set a PIN code to the master poker view (the icon on the left pane of the Jira board) it was not possible to use mini/micro poker. Now it is possible and there is a prompt to enter your PIN code if not yet entered. It’s entered once and remembered until changed. This unlocks the mini/micro poker views.

Board switching in Jira server

Previously the board switching feature was only available in Jira Cloud. Now boards can be switched from inside the board room using the same button (with location icon). It opens board selector dialog box to open a new room.

Pressing the room selector will open a dialog box in the bottom part of the screen to find another room to switch into. This is equivalent of navigating to another board and selecting the room.

Attachments not displayed

Before it was not possible to view attachments as images, documents, etc. Now participants with access to the story can see the attachments and scroll through them easier.

Additionally, image attachments can be watched as a carousel preview. When an image attachment is selected, a carousel view pops in the bottom of the screen.

Pause resume not always triggering immediately

Before sometimes the pause resume did not calculate properly the remaining time leading to immediate finishing the game after resume. Now the timers for the game are centralised and pause/resume and the remaining time until the game ends are properly calculated.

Gitlab images not displayed

Before the gitlab integration used wrong image URLs in the description. Now the images are properly shown. Additionally, attachments are now downloadable and commenting is accessible (list, create delete comments).

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

The new release has few new features and mostly bugfixes.

New features

Default issue type for preset

Before it was a tedious process to assign presets to tickets as the tickets are added to the list of stories to refine. Now certain presets can be automatically assigned to Jira issues at the moment of adding them to the list. This is done by assigning an issue type per preset from the room settings page.

After the default issue type is assigned to the preset, when adding a new story to the list this preset is automatically assigned to the newly added stories of this type. Existing stories are left intact.

The presets can be certainly manually unassigned, or another preset assigned to a ticket with an already assigned preset.

Note: Please make sure to have selected a preset first, otherwise the new setting won’t appear.

If all is ok with the assignment of the issue type per preset, adding new story will automatically assign the presets:

New T-Shirt card images

We have now new images for the T-Shirt cards that bring more joy! Now except by the T-Shirt size you can make fun with the size of the animal wearing the T-Shirt on the card. There will be more card sets soon, so stay tuned!

Bugs fixed

Jira estimate field was not always used when specified

Jira estimate field now always overrides default board settings if present. Before in some cases the board’s default estimation took precedence over the specifically assigned Jira estimate field.

Note: when voting in a board room, by default the board settings for estimation are used and you don’t need to do any custom configuration. Only when using time as estimation you need to map points to time in the room settings so that the cards with points and the free scale tool can work.

Error notification now popping when estimation has failed

Before if estimation failed, the game silently continued. Now an error is popped up in the top-middle side of the screen. The error describes in more detail why the estimation has failed. Usually this is due to missing field in the edit screen or permission issue or a general field configuration problem. Additionally, in the browser log there are more verbose messages when performing the estimation, prefixed with ‘ESTIMATION: ‘ which can be used for additional diagnostics. More on why the estimation can fail and how to troubleshoot you can read here.

Warning hints on stories that may fail estimation

Some stories may not be properly estimated in the given room. This is because they might be part of a different board, a different project and may not match the estimation configuration set up into the current room. In this case there is a small yellow warning sign that indicates more details on the problem.

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

The new release focuses mostly on the Jira integration. There are a couple of new features introduced few bug fixes.

New Features

The new features introduced allow the display of the original estimate in the stories list and the use of a custom field for description in case of very specific configurations when the default description field is missing or replaced with another custom field.

Show original estimate

Often it happened that a ticket being scheduled for estimation has already been estimated in another session (another poker room) or using other means. When the estimation started, the team was surprised to find out that estimating the current ticket is not needed since it was already done somehow.

Now it is possible to see the original estimate in the list of stories and remove the stories that have already been estimated.

The option is controlled via the Options->Integrations->Jira and is enabled by default. If you don’t need this functionality, you can disable it from the room options and the original estimate will not be shown anymore.

The original estimate is displayed in red color inside a gray rectangle just at the right side of the ticket ID.

At the bottom, at the left of the ‘clear all stories’ button, there is a new button to remove all stories that have already been estimated.

Custom description field

In certain more complex Jira configurations, sometimes the default description field is replaced with another one, usually a custom field with a different name. Before the collaboration view was not able to properly display this description.

Now it is possible to use a different field for the description in the collaboration view. If the custom description field applies for all issue types, then just changing the field from the bottom of the Settings->Cards tab is enough.

If the field is different for certain issue types, it’s better to use presets. The preset is a combination of card settings that can be applied for an issue during the estimation. Let’s imagine that there is a custom field called ‘Custom Bug Description’ for issues of type Bug and a custom field ‘Custom Story Description’ for issues of type Story. The other ticket types would have the same old ‘description’ field. This configuration can be done by adding 2 new presets called ‘Bug’ and ‘Story’.

To edit the preset, select it first from the drop down and then scroll to the bottom of the settings box and choose the description field. For example, for the ‘Bug’ preset it would look like this:

And for the ‘Story’ preset it would look like this:

After the presets (card configurations) are properly configured, the preset can be applied to each story in the list of stories by clicking (left mouse button) on the issue type icon. A context menu appears with the list of presets that can be assigned to an issue.

Issues from other projects that have no custom description fields do not need to have the custom preset assigned.

As a small reminder, the preset is often used to completely change the estimation process for an issue, for example use T-Shirt cards for bugs, regular Fibonacci cards for stories and a time slider for tasks. The voting screen adapts to the type of issue when selected.

Note: After assigning the preset to the ticket you may need to select or press the reload button to refresh the ticket content from Jira. Then the real description from the new custom field will appear in the collaboration view.

Bugfixing

Some small bugs have been fixed.

Ticket estimate not shown in the similar tickets tab on Server/Data Center

Before, the ‘Similar Tickets’ tab in the voting summary was not showing the estimates for each ticket. Even though the accurate tickets have been displayed, the estimate was not visible.

Now the estimate is there.

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

This release focuses on several usability improvements reported by our customers recently. Mostly this concerns the asynchronous voting and the summary box.

New features

After a pause for new features connected to mostly bug-fixing and support requests, we’re back on the track with the backlog of feature requests.

Asynchronous voting improvements

The asynchronous voting was a bit awkward as it didn’t show the current voting progress. It was difficult to understand when the voting has completed and it is time to collect the votes or ask for colleagues to complete the voting. Now the progress is visible.

The following progress is displayed:

• Overall progress for the session
• Progress for each team member who has voted at least once
• Progress for each planned story

The circular progress bar on the left is the overall progress and is the average of the completion percentage of all stories.

The progress for each team member is displayed in a row above the stories. If someone hasn’t voted for all stories, you could touch-base with the colleague to ask to vote for all stories

The progress for each story is displayed as a badge on the donut-chart icon at the right of the story. For example. if it shows 75% then 3 out of 4 team members voted for the story.

Note: The asynchronous voting has the following use case scenarios:

• All team members vote in advance (through the voicemail buttons on the right of each story), the scrum master collects/adjusts the votes
• Part of the team members vote in advance (through the voicemail buttons on the right of each story), the scrum master and the rest of the team members vote in real-time collaboratively discussing all votes (including the ones given in advance)

Similar tickets

This feature is available for Jira users only. The feature allows the users to see all tickets from the project to which the ticket belongs to that have a similar estimate.

There are 3 parameters that can be adjusted to better find similar tickets. First is the actual JQL the will be executed when you click on the ‘Similar tickets’ tab in the summary box. The JQL is a template and the {project} will be replaced with the current ticket’s project, the {field} will be replaced with the name of the field (Story Points, Story point estimate, timeoriginalestimate, etc.) and finally the {estimate_lower} and {estimate_upper} will be replaced with estimate*(1-tolerance/100.0) and estimate*(1+tolerance/100.0) respectively.

Next is the tolerance in percentage to indicate in what range similar tickets will be sought.

Finally the number of results returned can be set. This limits the number of similar tickets to avoid bloated results and focus only on the top-ranked results. If you don’t want sorting by rank or use more complex JQL queries, you can adjust it in the settings page (Integrations/Jira).

The similar tickets tab is a new one and appears only to non-external Jira users at the right of the summary tab. It shows the JQL query executed and the results.

If the JQL query was not specified correctly (has syntax errors for example), an error box will displayed with the details on the error. You can use the ordinary Jira advanced search for tuning the JQL before pasting it into the room settings.

The similarity of the estimate is calculated as a deviation to the current estimate. For example, when the tolerance is 0 and the estimate is 3, only stories from the ticket’s project that have estimate 3 will be displayed. If the tolerance is 50% then stories with 2 and 3 story points will be displayed.

The number of stories displayed in the similar stories tab is also controlled from the settings page inside Integrations/Jira tab.

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

This is a small release while preparing for the Jira Data Center launch and merging our Jira offerings into a single product line.

New features

A couple of new features are introduced in the area of external integrations and usability.

Generic automation

So far Scrumpy Poker supported only Jira Automation. As of this release, generic automation through POST HTTP webhook is available. Tools like Zapier, Slack Workflow, Microsoft Flow, etc. can be now used on events such as adding/removing stories or estimating them. Soon generic automation will be available for adding new stories to the planning list so stay tuned.

The new Generic Automation section can be found in the Integration section of the settings for each Scrumpy Poker room.

Explicitly terminate a session

Now it is possible to terminate a planning/refinement session from a button instead of waiting until all participants disconnect. Before some users left the browser window open and this lead to resumed session on the next day instead of starting a new one. Also, sometimes it is convenient to have a logical separation between to sessions in the same day for example.

Additionally, when all stories from the refinement session are over, the same hint will be displayed in the stories list section.

Bugfixing

Card 0 not shown in summary

Before when the average vote was mapped to 0 (when all participants vote with 0), the card was not displayed in the summary box. Only the value 0 was visible.

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

This release contains only usability features and small bugfixes.

New features

Advanced JQL search

The search box might be a bit difficult to handle when there is no preview for the JQL queries. To overcome this problem, the default Jira JQL search dialog can be now launched from a button right to the search box or in the stories drop down list.

The JQL search provided by Jira gives a native preview for the searched tickets. The query can be optimized and verified and then sent directly to the Scrumpy Poker search box so that the stories can be added.

The feature is only available in Jira Cloud.

Bugfixes

JQL error missing

Before it was not clear if empty result was returned or there was an error in the JQL. Now when there is a problem with the JQL a reasonable error message is displayed.

Links now clickable in chat and room description

Now links in the chat messages and room descriptions are clickable. It is more useful when sending link with instructions or external documentation.

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

The new release of Scrumpy Poker contains few features based on customer feedback and a lot of small bugfixes that were recently found. Additionally there are a lot of internal changes in the application as a preparation to the upcoming on-premises installation bundle.

New Features

Averaging technique

Until now Scrumpy Poker was only able to pick up the average estimate using plain arithmetic mean value. While this was useful in most of the cases, there voting applications where median or mode value matter more. That’s why now we have several averaging techniques

• Average. This is the default, plain old arithmetic average that was used so far in Scrumpy Poker.
• Median. This picks up the median value.
• Most common. This picks up the value that occurs most of the time in the result set, e.g. mode value.
• Minimum. This picks up the minimum value in the results set.
• Maximum. this picks up the maximum value in the result set.

The averaging technique chosen also reflects in the comment messages in Jira/Slack/GitLab/GitHub. For example if Median is chosen for averaging, the message is ‘… the median vote was 2‘.

You can change the averaging technique from the main settings page as follows:

The averaging method is now appended as a badge to the story point or time result both in the planning section and in the result section to indicate the method in case it is changed often between voting sessions.

Dutch translation

Thanks to our friends in the translation community, we have a new translation from the nl_NL locale!

Anyone who wants can translate Scrumpy Poker in his/her own language. There is a test environment setup which can help with validating the translated strings. You can check our GitHub repository for more information.

Bugfixes

Disconnected voters

During long voting sessions sometimes participants may lose connection to our systems for a couple of seconds. There are many factors that can affect a long running keep-alive connection. This is not visible during the preparation for voting. When voting starts though, especially when the option to complete voting when everybody pointed a card caused some unwanted story flips since with less connected users the system thought that everybody has already voted.

Now when the voting starts, the system remembers who was in at that time and waits until all those people vote. If a participant is temporarily disconnected, it appears in the right pane as offline. The counter is not reset, the story does not flip. You can wait until this participant reconnects, or if the participant has permanently left the room with a reason, you can decide not to wait and press the (X) button on this participant.

Certainly, as before when voting completes and someone leaves the room, the vote is not lost and displayed on the place of the hourglass.

Wrong card in asynchronous voting comment dialog

Before when voting asynchronously and adding a comment on a story with a preset assigned, the card hint was wrong. Now the correct card is displayed when presets are used.

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!

In the last 2 years we’ve spent great effort in delivering the current version of the product. With your help and precious feedback that you’ve provided, Scrumpy Poker became a tool that is very useful to thousands of companies worldwide. It saves time and makes the planning and refinement sessions shorter and more productive through the collaboration effort of the team.

We have great plans for bringing in a lot more features including relative estimation, multi-level estimation, more card packs, more integrations, UI improvements and extensions as well as priority support and faster delivery of new features.

In order to accomplish our plans, we are making a transition from an incognito startup to a working business. It’s a great step forward for AELBOX that will allow us to deliver faster and better products helping more people save time and increase productivity.

At some time in November 2020 Scrumpy Poker Jira add-ons will become paid and on-premises installation will become available. You’ll still have the usual trial period after that. The price is more than competitive and even though the add-on is very rich on features, Scrumpy Poker will be priced on the lower end as a courtesy to all of you who supported us so far.

Note: The old Jira Server-only add-on will continue functioning without problems until 31st of March 2021. After that you will have the regular 1 month trial from the Marketplace on the new listing that can be extended up to 6 months before the purchase.

Note: We are combining our separate Jira offers into one multi-platform offer for better recognition of the product and to adhere to the Marketplace listing standards. The old Jira Server only add-on listing is now archived and not visible in the Marketplace.

Note: As a celebration to the completion of our new unified Marketplace listing, we’re giving 35% discount for purchases of the Jira Server and Jira Data Center add-on versions until the end of April 2021. Check the discount links below!

The pricing table below shows the details:

Please don’t hesitate to get back to us at info@scrumpy.poker with feedback on the pricing or any comments and questions.

Introduction

We’re really excited! This release represents a major milestone for us. We’re officially no more beta. This means that the product has reached maturity. We’re actively working with the 2100+ companies actively using Scrumpy Poker to add new features in a time-frame as short as possible. Thank you all who participated in the shaping of this product and make the planning sessions fun. Please read more about this news here.

New Features

Officially no more Beta!

There is a slight change in the subdomains. The play-beta.scrumpypoker.com is now play-game.scrumpypoker.com. The beta.scrumpypoker.com is now game.scrumpypoker.com. There are certainly automatic redirects so that the old links are also valid. To avoid the redirect hop and having obsolete links in the future though it’s preferable that you update your bookmarks. We have great plans with this product. Happy non-beta voting 😉

Note: Please update/upgrade the Jira add-ons and then do a full page refresh in the browser if you experience timeouts or screen freeze at loading. We have changed DNS records, sometimes they are cached in the browser and doing a full page reload in the Jira backlog view after upgrading the add-ons solves the issue.

Note: Jira Software Server users need to update to the latest version 1.1.7, there are bugs addressed with inability to load the poker room.

Note: Corporate firewall/proxies may block the new game.scrumpypoker.com and play-game.scrumpypoker.com domains. Please contact your devops/admin to allow those new sub-domains.

Jira Automation integration

Scrumpy Poker now supports Jira Automation in both directions. With this great new feature it’s now easy to automate the integration with Scrumpy Poker and Jira. Here are some use cases that can help you understand the benefit.

From Jira to Scrumpy Poker

Usually adding new tickets means that they have to be estimated before adding them to the sprint. The usual process is to go to Scrumpy Poker and add the new tickets or use the Micro and Mini poker links to add them from inside the Jira search or backlog view. Now it is possible to implement a Jira Automation with just few clicks that will send every new story to Scrumpy Poker for estimation. This way the stories will be in the poker room just waiting for someone to estimate them.

Sometimes existing tickets are either marked or unmarked for estimation by adding a label or changing the ticket state. There is a duplicate work – first mark the ticket for estimation and then manually add it to Scrumpy Poker. Now this process is easy, with just few clicks you can create a Jira Automation that sends or removes a story for estimation to a poker room.

The new setting is available from the Settings page, the Integrations -> Jira tab. When creating a Jira Automation you should choose the Send Web Request POST type of action and paste the endpoint URL above.

Note: There are 2 URLs – one for adding or updating stories and one for removing stories. The remove URL can be used to remove stories for estimation when the status in Jira transitions to Estimated for example.

Note: Please set the Webhook body to Issue Data inside the Jira Automation interface. If you fail to do so, the web request will fail as it expects the issue data in its POST body.

The reset button resets the key that is used to send the POST request. You can reset it if you believe your link was compromised due to too much copy-pasting and sharing.

From Scrumpy Poker to Jira

When a story is added to Scrumpy Poker for estimation a Jira Automation can be created to update its status, flag it, add a label, etc.

Sometimes it is convenient to also change the ticket status or mark it as estimated when the estimation in Scrumpy Poker is completed and probably even add it to the next sprint.

We’ve got feature requests before to do multiple actions and update multiple fields when a story is estimated. Now this is possible through this feature.

The option is available in the settings page of a room in Integrations -> Jira tab. You need to paste the Jira Automation Incoming Webhook URL in the box to see the developer section with the details.

As per documentation the request contains the list of issues that were added/removed/estimated and the action itself – either add, remove, or estimate. The action can be accessed as {{webhookData.action}}.

Note: A previously released feature – be able to JQL search stories inside Jira that have been estimated in Scrumpy Poker or are scheduled for estimation is now superseded by this feature. It’s up to you to decide if this will be a status (e.g. To Estimate) or a searchable entity property.

Please contact us or raise a support request if you need help with advanced automation.

Optional Slack add/remove notifications

Before the Slack integration was only sending a message to a room when an issue is estimated. Now the integration can optionally send a message when a story is added or removed.

The setting is available in the settings page, the Integrations section, Slack tab.

After enabling the Post when added and Post when removed, you can see messages like this in your Slack channel (depending on how you customize the icons and label).

Bugfixes

Stories list jumping around

While adding and removing stories with the button in the search box list (center top of Scrumpy Poker room) the layout was a bit jumpy due to selecting the last added story. Now the story is not selected by default and when you add/remove stories from the search box list the drop down box will stay as it is.

This is a convenience bugfix which was needed for quite some time.

Add all stories adding only the first story

This was a recent regression. When multiple stories are listed adding them all has failed the first time adding only the first story from the list.

Now this is fixed and the Add all stories button does indeed add all stories to the list of planned stories.

Add all stories somewhat slow

Due to a recent regression on enabling the feature to search for Scrumpy Poker stories in the Jira’s advanced search view there was a delay when adding multiple stories. Now this delay is no longer observed.

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!

We’re thrilled to announce that Scrumpy Poker is no longer Beta! The product is now mature enough to continue its way further. Thank you all who contributed to this release! Thank you all who patiently waited until most of the bugs are fixed. Thank you all who suggested improvements in both the usability of the interface and the feature set currently available in the product!

Scrumpy Poker started with the idea to make fun out of the Scrum planning sessions. To make them pleasant and productive. Fun comes first, it makes people more open to discussion during the estimation process. It can turn a boring refinement session into something somehow more interesting than it usually is. This leads to more accurate story estimates.

Fun comes first, so is the user interface adapted to this fun process to make refinement sessions smooth. Yes, this reflects the UI – sometimes a bit clumsy, but it makes cool experience once you get the feeling of collaboration.

At some point it was a challenging task to catch up with the demand of both features and performance. Today we get hundreds of thousands of daily sessions from companies worldwide. We serve a lot of small projects, more than 2100 active Jira instances, many fortune 500 companies and big enterprises, all enjoying the Scrumpy Poker’s estimation experience.

Our journey continues with more and more features targeting the enterprise customers. We aim to provide on-premise installations for Jira Server/DataCenter. We have plans to continue expanding in the segment of integrations with other platforms. And a lot of new features in the backlog are waiting for attention.

Note: if you experience page load problems after the update, please read the notes under the first section at the release notes, there are is a small set of troubleshooting remarks and don’t hesitate to contact us.

Thanks again and happy voting!

The Scrumpy Poker team.