Comments and attachments in release Sep 16 2018

Introduction

In the new release you can find great new enhancements like comments and attachments in the collaboration view, an option to disable voting auto-start as well a small number of bug-fixes.

New features

Show Jira comments and attachments in the Collaboration View

Sometimes the important information about a ticket is not only in the ticket’s description. Comments and attachments are important so now they are also displayed in expandable sections.

The comments section lists each comment in it’s own paragraph citing the author as follows:

The attachments are displayed each in their own paragraph and a thumbnail if the file format supports thumbnails (e.g. image)

Add an option to disable voting auto-start

For some teams it is natural that any participant can vote at any time, even before it is officially announced that voting is enabled. For other teams this sometimes breaks the concentration of participants or causes awkward questions why some people vote too early. To overcome this, there is a new option in the Settings box to disable voting auto-start by any participant. When enabled, only the moderator can start the vote.

Add preset to download and upload stories

Now it is possible to import/export the stories together with their voting presets. This means that each story can have its own voting style like T-Shirt for bugs, Fibonacci for normal stories, etc.

Card presets as shortcut under the stories list

Now it is possible to switch presets ad-hoc from a button just bellow the list of stories. Note that this resets the default voting preset for all stories that have no explicitly assigned a preset. If this is done by accident, the old setup can be restored from the Settings page. At least 2 presets are needed to make the button visible.

Add temporary maintenance page

We’re working towards disabling any maintenance issues at all with smooth zero down-time deployment. Until this is implemented, we’ve added a maintenance page which will show that there is an undergoing maintenance which usually lasts between 15 and 25 seconds.

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!

September 10, 2018September 10, 2018

Card presets in release Sep 08 2018

Introduction

The new release includes a bit more bug fixes than usual and few new features including card presets which help to use different cards per planned story.

New Features

Card presets

The card presets introduce different set of cards (a combination of card types and enabled cards) per each planned story. The presets can be defined from the Settings dialog box in the Cards tab as follows:

Pressing the (x) button in the preset chip deletes it. Pressing the (x) button in the preset combo box switches to the default voting cards.

Changing card types and enabled cards while a preset is active will change only the selected preset. The default voting cards will be left as is.

Each preset must start with a unique letter so that this letter is used as a badge for planned stories that have presets defined. By clicking on the story avatar, a menu appears from which a preset can be selected. The menu is available only if there is at least one preset defined.

The selected preset can be removed with the Clear preset menu entry. Once a preset is defined for a story, the voting cards will switch as soon as this story is selected.

The early voting for stories with an assigned preset will also show the set of cards that are allowed to be used.

Improved drag & drop

The drag & drop now shows empty space for the item that is being dragged. This makes drag & drop more intuitive and shows exactly where the item will be dropped.

Add an option to switch adding new stories to bottom or top

Sometimes it is more convenient to append stories to the end of the planned stories list instead of placing it always at the top. There is now an option that allows placing stories at the bottom of the list:

Invite via e-mail

Sometimes it is more convenient to directly send invitation to a list of users via e-mail. This is now possible from the share button:

A dialog box pops up where a list of e-mail addresses can be entered. All e-mail addresses must be valid to be able to send the invitation:

Disabling moderator vote

Now the disable moderator vote is more intuitive and is more clear that the moderator cannot vote. A question mark in grayed out state appears as the vote of the moderator to indicate that this will be the default vote if no other participant voted at all:

If there are participants voted or there are early votes, the There be dragons vote of the moderator will disappear.

There is also a +1 suffix to the total number of participants to indicate that the moderator cannot vote and is added passively on top of the other participants.

Happy voting!

September 2, 2018September 2, 2018

Import/Export CSV in release Sep 01 2018

Introduction

The new release includes a big new feature assisting users that have no Jira integration (CSV Import/Export) and also some minor improvements on how to reach out for help or ask ad-hoc questions.

New Features

Import and Export CSV

When using Scrumpy Planning Poker as estimation tool for which we don’t have direct integration, our users have to write each story by hand or copy-paste the title and optionally the summary and description.

Now it is possible to import a CSV (comma-separated value plain text content file). The encoding of the file must be UTF-8 to be able to keep the special characters inside. The import/export shortcuts are available just below the cards:

When you click on the upload button (the leftmost one), a dialog box will appear where you can either select files directly by clicking on the outlined area or drag & drop files from a folder:

The format of the CSV file is as follows:

Comma-separated values
Quoted string entries and unquoted number entries (e.g. current story points)
UTF-8 encoding

The header is the following:

assignee: The assignee of the ticket
avatar: The icon for the ticket indicating if this is a bug, story, epic, etc. (32x32px or vector image)
description: A more detailed explanation of the ticket
key(*): An obligatory ticket ID, for example AB-1234
link: A URL to the system where the ticket is located
status: The current ticket status (in progress, to refine, etc.)
statusAvatar: The icon for the current ticket status (16x16px or vector image)
storyPoints: The currently assigned story points
summary: A short description of the ticket

The easiest way to check the format is to export an existing list of stories with the export button.

More shortcuts to interactive help and support

We’ve seen that some customers ask ad-hoc questions via the feedback form so we decided to add shortcuts for sending e-mail to our info address and an invitation shortcut to our #Slack discussion board. This way we’ll be able to immediately respond to questions on how to use certain feature.

Happy voting!

August 26, 2018August 26, 2018

Collaboration editor in release Aug 26 2018

Introduction

The new release from Aug 26 2018 contains many new features like the Collaboration Editor that we believe will make the use of Scrumpy Planning Poker even more fun!

Bugs fixed

New Room

The New Room menu entry is now operational again. Pressing this item creates a brand new Planning Poker room

New Features

Confluence Spaces and Pages

Before, only up to 25 Confluence Spaces and Pages could be displayed, and this caused troubles when setting up a summary page for Jira instances with a lot of spaces and pages. Now the limit is raised to 500, which should be enough to list the needed spaces and pages.

Show the JQL errors

When typing a JQL query, especially when it is a complex one, there is always a chance for making a mistake. Before, the query silently failed returning no results. Now the JQL error is printed just below the wrong query giving a detailed hint what might have gone wrong:

Display the meaning of the special cards

People often ask what is the meaning of the special cards. Well, they were intentionally left without description to let users put their own meanings and semantics. Now there is a short introduction with the most common usage for those cards in the welcome (help) page:

Play sounds when game starts/ends or is about to end

Usually, when the team is focused on reading and discussing the story, some participants tend to start the voting process earlier, before it was officially announced. Also, while being focused on reading the description, it is common to skip the announcement of the voting session start. That’s why, Scrumpy Planning Poker now plays discrete sounds when the first vote is made or the session starts. Also, when the game ends, a notification sound is played too. The sounds can certainly be switched off from the settings panel (active per participant):

Display Jira ticket description

Before, participants had to switch to external systems (e.g. Jira) to view the story details. Now, a separate split pane is displayed which contains the story description. It is now hopefully more convenient to stay in the Scrumpy Planning Poker application and discuss the issue summary and description without having to switch to Jira and then go back:

Add split pane for summary for non-Jira accounts

For the regular accounts that do not use the Jira integration it was a bit difficult to fit story details in only one sentence (the story title). This caused troubles for the team to get introduced to the story being refined. Now, the user story summary and description are available for display and edit on the right pane (collaboration view). It is now more convenient to enter and show story details that are visible to the team:

Summary and description for non-Jira users

Collaboration editor (split pane)

And finally, the most important feature in the current release – the wysiwyg collaboration editor. The right pane of the screen, where summary and description is displayed, actually now allows direct editing with a single mouse click (by the moderator only). To add special styles like bold, italic, heading, links, etc. you need to select the text that needs special formatting. Don’t forget to press the Save icon to persist the changes! When Jira integration is active, the changes are directly persisted in the Jira ticket. Also, when edited and styled in Jira, the formatting is also available in Scrumpy Planning Poker! Here is how the collaboration editor looks:

Happy voting!

August 5, 2018

Early voting in release Aug 05 2018

Introduction

The new release is now out and here are the outlines of what’s new in the latest release.

Bugs fixed

The following issues were resolved with the last release

Historical estimates do not always match what was chosen

When overriding the selected vote by Scrumpy, this vote was not properly displayed in the historical view (left pane). Now the correct vote is there

New features

The new features were carefully crafted according to the Feature Requests page and the received up-votes.

Auto-flip the cards once everyone has voted

Before, when all participants have voted, the timer was activated and the moderator had to press the forward button to complete the voting earlier. Now there is a new setting called Complete when everybody voted. When this option is enabled, the game ends immediately after all participants voted.

Early voting

Sometimes not all participants can be available for the planning/refinement session. In this case, it’s convenient to leave the vote in advance and let the team discuss it. Voting after is not possible since we believe that there must be always a discussion about the votes. In case early voting is not possible and being at the meeting is not an option, we think it is better to schedule another session.

The early voting can be enabled from the Settings page with the option Allow early voting as described below:

After the early voting is enabled, all the participants except the moderator can give their early vote at any time. This usually happens the same day or the day before the refinement session. The early vote is displayed on the right side of the ticket and is not visible to the other participants.

When the session starts, during the voting process the participants see the list of people who voted early:

Finally, when the cards are flipped and voting is complete, the result is shown in the summary page:

Happy voting!

July 28, 2018August 23, 2018

Fibonacci and T-Shirt in release Jul 28 2018

Introduction

The latest release of Scrumpy Planning Poker is focused on the different types of card types for estimation. With this release, the application now supports different type of cards and custom story points mapping that can fit every case like Fibonacci and T-Shirt story sizing.

New features

The new features were carefully crafted according to the Feature Requests page and the received up-votes.

Selecting cards sequences

Before, there was only one type of card sequence – 0,0.5,1,3,5,8,13,20,40,100. From the settings page, now you can select a few more sequences which have a different purpose. For example, the Fibonacci sequence is more accurate when estimating more complex tasks, while the T-Shirt estimate is not bound to points and can have a custom mapping from a T-shirt to story point.

The sequence can be chosen at any time from the Settings page. The Settings page can be open only when there is no current voting session.

Real Fibonacci sequence

Before, Scrumpy Planning Poker used only the most commonly used cards for estimation, which partly resembled a Fibonacci sequence, but was not exactly this. Now, the real Fibonacci sequence of 1,3,5,8,13,21,34,55,89,144 is available.

The Fibonacci sequence is more convenient when estimating more complex tasks which are above the regular 1-13 set of estimates.

T-shirt story sizing

The T-Shirt story sizing is convenient when stories are not visually bound to story points, but to T-shirt sizes. This way the voters evaluate tasks by small/big scale without thinking about the story points. This card sequence allows custom mapping to any type of ascending story points. The scale can be linear, progressive, exponential or anything that fits the project.

The adjusting of the mapping from a T-shirt to story points is available in the Settings page. Note that only ascending mappings is supported, e.g. the cards must be ordered from small to big.

Happy voting!

All those nice features have been implemented 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 to our Feature Requests page or up-vote an existing feature that you find useful. Thank you!

July 21, 2018July 21, 2018

What’s new in release Jul 21 2018

Introduction

This release is the result of our new program to let our customers build Scrumpy Planning Poker the way it fits best their needs. We’ve opened a separate page for collecting ideas and allowing up-voting.

The ideas page

The page allows both us and our customers to freely submit ideas. Those ideas are edited and published in the ideas section of the page. Then anyone can vote up or down for a feature. We are implementing those feature requests according to the priority and include some of them in the next release. The new features are documented at the bottom of the same page.

Release Jul 21

The release includes the following features:

Exclude certain cards

Now cards can be excluded from the Cards tab in the settings page as follows:

Once the cards are excluded from the check mark in the Cards settings, they are marked as unavailable in the voting section to avoid disconcentrating the players.

Stop animated blue bar after voting

The annoying animated bar that distracts the voters attention when discussing the results is now gone. Now the box appears as follows:

Add support for JQL

Now you can enter regular JQL queries in the story search box. Additionally, there are other usability improvements like combining several JQL queries, adding individual tickets to the list and convenience buttons for adding and removing stories to the list for the refinement session:

Legend

JQL query in addition to individual Jira tickets
A clear button that also resets the drop down to the list of planned stories
A quick add/remove buttons to easily adjust the list of planned stories

Create poker room per team

Now inside the Jira plugin the currently selected board is used to map to a room, or the project itself when used in the root dashboard. The board is the closest match to ‘Team’ in standard Jira installations. In the future we might extend this to support Jira Portfolio teams.

legend

Mapping board per poker room. Each project can have more than one board. If no board is defined, the project is mapped to a room.
Planning poker shortcut in the project’s space

Shortcuts to project’s room in Jira

The project space now has a shortcut to the currently selected board’s poker room or the project itself if no board is defined. The Estimate button has been removed as it is much easier to use the new JQL query in the search box.

Support for IE11

Now IE11 is a supported browser. Before we didn’t consider this browser at all, but since it was submitted as a feature request and up-voted so it became a supported browser.

Your vote matters

Thank you all for submitting those nice and useful ideas! You can get back at any time to the feature requests page and tell us what you need or provide some instant feedback from inside the application.

May 26, 2018June 5, 2018

Confluence, Jira, Stride and Slack integrations

Introduction

Scrumpy Planning Poker integrates with various external systems like Jira and Confluence to make the voting process as transparent and convenient as possible. In this post, we shall discuss, the most common integrations that are a must-have for every scrum team using story points for estimating tasks.

Setting up the integrations

When you sign in as a room moderator to the Scrumpy Planning Poker application, you can configure the integrations from the settings page:

Inside the settings, there are several integrations mainly done through user/API token combinations or web-hook URLs.

Jira integration

The Jira integration is described in detail in Jira integration for Scrumpy Planning Poker and consists of entering the details:

Jira root URL. This is the root domain which you open when navigating to the Jira ticketing system. For example, your-company.atlassian.net.
Jira user. This is the user on whose behalf Scrumpy Planning Poker will update story points, add comments with estimate summary or create Confluence summary pages for the refinement sessions. For example, your.name@your-company.com.
Jira API token. This is the API token that can be obtained from the Atlassian Account Manager. The API token is used to authorize your Jira user to make comments, update story points or create Confluence pages.

After the Jira integration is set up, when a ticket is refined its story points are automatically updated and in addition to that, a comment is added when and how it was estimated.

Confluence integration

The integration with Confluence uses the same link and credentials as the Jira integration. You can specify which Confluence space will be used as a container for the summary pages created from the refinements.

When the last participant leaves a planning poker room, and this room is set up for summarizing in Confluence, a new Confluence page is created. The page is a summary of the voting session containing anonymous votes from the participants in the refinement session. The following screenshot shows an example:

Stride integration

The Stride application integration is used to publish messages in a chat room when a story is refined. A brief message similar to the one added as a comment in the refined Jira ticket is printed, for example:

The integration consists of entering the following details in the settings dialog box:

Stride room URL for posting messages. This is the link that can be copied from Stride when a bot needs to publish messages there. An example is “https://api.atlassian.com/site/aedcbe61-1d38-4c3c-8781-aff9d49e7e12/conversation/5abe1d2c-d447-41ea-9cae-6ff44b1ecbf0/message”
Stride authorization token. This token can be obtained from the Stride application. For example: e6fK73KSUiRiKysQaQdb.

Slack integration

The Slack application integration is used to publish messages in a chat room when a story is refined. A brief message similar to the one added as a comment in the refined Jira ticket is printed, for example:

The integration consists of entering the following details in the settings dialog box:

Slack web-hook URL. This link can be taken from the Slack settings for the Incoming web-hook integration page. The appearance of the posting robot can be customized there also. The link can be entered in the settings dialog box of Scrumpy Planning Poker.

Integration demo

The following video shows how the Jira integration is used and the advantages when Scrumpy Planning Poker is directly integrated with Jira:

April 1, 2018July 24, 2018

Jira integration for Scrumpy Planning Poker

Introduction

Scrumpy Planning Poker provides an easy way to connect to Jira and Confluence. The integration includes automatically filling in story/bug/task details, placing story points on tickets when voting is complete and finally adding a comment in the story how it was estimated and what was the average estimate. Optionally, a Confluence summary page can be generated with anonymous voting information for each ticket refined during the session.

The Atlassian Plugin

The most straight-forward way to integrate with Jira and Confluence is to install the Atlassian plugin. From inside Jira using a simple shortcut, a planning poker room can be open and associated with the currently selected project board. The name of the room is the name of the Jira board. The Jira users will be mapped directly to participants and the estimating process can immediately start.

From inside the story search box in the planning poker room, the Jira tickets can be individually selected or in bulk using JQL.

Getting the Atlassian API token

In case installing the plugin to the Jira Cloud instance is not an option, an API token can be generated to let Scrumpy Planning Poker use Jira and Confluence on your behalf.

The information that Scrumpy Planning Poker needs

Using this API token, Scrumpy Planning Poker will be able to search tickets in Jira as you type them in the search box, automatically update the story points estimate, add comments in the ticket with a summary and finally generate a summary Confluence page.

Obtaining the API token

To get this token, navigate your browser to the Atlassian Account Management portal and log in if not yet signed in.

The next step is to select the API tokens menu on the left. This menu will take you to the next screen, where you can create a new API token. Those tokens can be revoked at any time and are not connected in any way with the master password of your account.

The final step is to press the Create API token which will generate a new API token. The token can be copied to the clipboard so that it can be easily pasted in the Scrumpy Planning Poker settings dialog box later.

After pressing the Create button, the token is ready to be entered in the Scrumpy Planning Poker settings and start using the Jira and Confluence integration.

Setting up Scrumpy Planning Poker

After the Jira site URL, the user on whose behalf the integration will happen and the API token are at hand, they can be entered in the settings page of Scrumpy Planning Poker.

When the Settings dialog box opens up, choose the Integrations tab to navigate to the settings that are specific to integrations with external applications.

The final step of the configuration is to fill in the Jira URL, the Username and the API token for Jira and Confluence integrations. The Jira URL is usually in the format <company>.atlassian.net or <company>.jira.com.

After the Atlassian credentials have been set up, a Confluence space can be selected to contain the summaries of the refinement sessions. For example, a brand new space called “Refinement Sessions” or “Refinement Sessions – Blockchain Team” can be created. If this is not needed, but previously set up, the X button can be used to remove the option to generate refinement session summaries.

Finally, the setup can be tested by trying to search for a Jira ticket in the search box of Scrumpy Planning Poker:

Congratulations! You can now set your Jira URL, user and API token in the Scrumpy Planning Poker’s room settings. This will allow you to search for Jira tickets, automatically fill in estimates in tickets and get a generated summary page at the end of the refinement session.

Please check this video tutorial on how you can setup Jira and Confluence integration and how you can prepare the tickets for the refinement sessions, estimate them and let Scrumpy Planning Poker automatically fill in the estimates and comments.