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Show HN: Planning poker online – estimate tasks without influencing others

planningpokeronline.com

89 pointsMiquelLHC55 comments

I am super excited to share with you the project I've been working on since January!

Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, it is a simple cards game where teams can estimate the effort of tasks in software development.

The goal of the app is to allow remote teams to play it in a simple and funny way.

It is used by 1k daily users and we are getting the first premium subscriptions.

We want to keep improving it so any feedback is appreciated.

Tech stack (my favourite as it is super agile): - React (CRA with typescript) - Firebase - Stripe

Looks nice! We have been looking at improving our sprint planning process and going to try this out today (instead of our typical spreadsheet!)

I hope you like it! :)

The words "poker online" will trigger all the antispams you can think of

yes good point! It is in the domain name so it will be difficult to get rid off it hehe I will think about it though, thanks!

yeah, my work firewall blocked the site as 'online gambling'. i suspect this is going to be a common challenge when trying to get businesses to use your site.

Are you using any CSS frameworks?

No, only CSS modules (https://github.com/css-modules/css-modules). It is already included as a feature in CRA https://create-react-app.dev/docs/adding-a-css-modules-style...

I like it because I don't need to worry about naming conflicts so I can speed up development a bit.

My issue with planning poker (and estimates in general) is that there is still a social pressure to push your estimates down as far as possible and ignore reality. I still think deadlines and limiting scope is the way to go.

And where are the deadlines coming from?

How do you fix the deadline and scope without estimates?

Within my teams, estimating doesn't appear to have downward pressure. Team members appear to want to estimate correctly because they want to have a realistic and steady workload. Driving down estimates means their workload goes up (at least in the short term, until our average velocity adjusts).

Estimates for anything sufficiently complex are pure fantasy. They just serve to place an engineer in a bargaining conundrum and makes them implicitly decrease the scope for the 1000's+ decisions they will need to make during the course of implementation that they are not going to deliver the desired (also implicit) expectations. Its better to work from deadlines, then at least the engineer can try to hedge down the scope and deliver something they are comfortable with.

That's a people problem not a poker problem.

This is really cool! How many votings are included in the free version? That would be interesting to know before we can test it in our team.

Sidenote: Planning poker is a registered trademark [1]. I hope you don't run into any legal issues.

[1] http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=3473287&caseType=US_REGIST...

We still haven't a good defined limit, but it should be enough for most of the meetings.

Thanks for legal advertisment.

Thought this was about actual poker, took me a minute to get it.

Having the word Scrum and Agile on the homepage, explaining the problem and solution statement could help a lot.

I think selling teams on the idea of planning poker is out of scope for this project. It's my impression that most devs and product people are already familiar with it, but that's just my own anecdata.

For those who know what planning poker is, the landing page is very clear.

Yep, planning poker is something I'd expect most people to encounter within their first day of direct contact with Scrum.

More generally: Tech is absolutely rotten with jargon, most of which is assembled from pre-existing words that have different meanings in their original context. I don't think it does us much use to complain about this fact whenever we get tripped up by it. Nobody wants to have to always define the context of their jargon before using it in order to avoid confusion any more than they want to use XML Schema and qualify the names of their tags at all times. It would just be a horrible chore. It will be quicker and easier for everyone if we just learn these bits of jargon ad-hoc, and accept the occasional moments of mild confusion as part of the job.

I have no idea what this is? What is an 'estimate' referring to, online poker? The image seems to make it look like a robot helps you estimate the amount you should bet when playing poker?

it refers to scrum poker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker

It's an estimation technique used in agile development.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker

Execution is nice but last weeks we found jira "agile poker" plugin that you can do estimations asynchronously. Other people don't see your estimations and you can do your estimations whenever you feel like it. Also all the stories and descriptions are visible in one place. So unfortunately this tool is not an improvement for me.

Good point! We are already thinking on adding stories information and the option "import task list" from jira, or similar.

do you like the asynchronous nature?

for me, the most valuable part of planning poker is when we see one vote that's way out of line with the rest, and that person explains their thinking, and some important discussion can take place. with asynchronous voting, i would imagine you'd get a fair bit of "oh, yeah, to be honest i don't remember why i gave that one an XL".

to be honest, i don't even see the point of keeping votes anonymous. if there's enough judgement in the room that people are ashamed to honestly say how difficult a task would be for them, i think that's a larger problem.

It is not the first time we get this kind of idea, maybe we will need to explore it a bit more. thanks for the idea

i don't even see the point of keeping votes anonymous

Judgement is potentially a problem.

But, beyond that, seeing votes could lead more timid team members to simply wait for the tech lead (or a boisterous team member) to vote and follow along.

oh, we do "put the card face down in front of you and we all turn them over at once".

I remember worst estimations when you have 7-8 people in the room and then everyone has "something to say" then it takes instead of 1 hour maybe 2.

With async 5 of those people can work on something else when 2 or 3 have questions or ideas about the story.

that's a problem in every part of the agile framework, but the mitigation should be the scrum master and enforced timeboxes for agile meetings. the scrum master must be assertive enough to step in and table all discussion at a certain point.

Hey! We are happy that you liked our product =) We are having few new things cooking up for the biggest pains and jobs our users face on day-to-day bases =) If you ever need any help, our support folks are there for you, you can reach them here: https://spartez-software.com/support or through the plugin.

@MiquelLHC Welcome to the Atlassian marketplace =) Good to have new vendors there to compete with)

it is good, indeed :)

Nice one, a few quick thoughts after playing for 2 mins tops (so take with some salt!):

1. When all players in the game have voted, just turn the cards to show the results right away

2. The tutorial moving around the screen was only ever so slightly annoying, wish it stayed in the one spot (or let me advance using arrow key on keyboard or something?) so I could just click through and read faster

3. I assume the link we get given is persistent and never expires? We'd want to have it as part of a recurring slack call for example without having to generate a new one each week.

EDIT: 4. I didn't think to click my username arrow to see all the menu options (especially 'Go unlimited') you may want to consider making at least that a bit more prominent.

Nice work.

Thank you so much for your feedback, it is well appreciated and we will think about it.

About point 3: yes, game urls are persistent and never expire but only in premium version, for free users games expire after a certain amount of votings. (Only game's creator needs to be premium)

Thanks for your time!

This is great. Clean landing page, easy to get started, simple and transparent pricing. Doesn't solve an enormous problem, but scratches an itch that's just annoying enough to justify the price.

I've shared it internally, excited to see if teams decide to use it. So far we've seen everything from spreadsheets to physical cards being used.

Congrats!

Thank you! Very nice comment, I appreciate it :)

I had no idea what this was about until I read your comment here that it was about scrum and work related. My first guess was that you would watch poker games and try to guess the outcome. I don't know if I'm just stupid (very very possible), otherwise my feedback would be to illustrate/explain/communicate more and better :)

Same here. I would advice the owner to change the way he markets this a little bit. Maybe mention the words Agile or Scrum at least.

Planning Poker is a well known term in the agile development / scrum world. If you don't do scrum, you're probably not in the target group.

I had been doing scrum in the last 10 years, poker and online sticks out so much that I didn’t realised that it has to do anything with scrum before I clicked.

Same here.

It would be nice if the results were anonymized so that people can voluntarily explain their high estimate. This is useful in highly politicized environments in which managers make fun of and pressure individual people for voting higher.

Hmmm, now and then I stumble over links that just won't work on Firefox, even with uBlock and uMatrix disabled. Here's one, I click "Start quick game", and all I get is black. Is this normal or an exception?

are you using some kind of firewall? Some users are facing problems when using them

Really not anything beyond the mentioned plugins. On my old system, I could open the offending pages in Chromium and they'd usually work there. On my new one I have no second browser yet, because my distro is Ubuntu-based and I've purged the snap bs.

https://tools.wmflabs.org/hatjitsu is a free alternative that highlights if there are any differences among revealed points.

> Uncaught DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from 'Window': Access is denied for this document.

White page.

No, I won't allow localStorage just to see your homepage.

Would you like this used by a construction company that were to renovate your house/apartment? Would it work for that?

Really nicely built! I am definitely using this the next time I'm doing a sprint planning session. Thanks for sharing

Cool! I am glad you like it!

Did we hug it to death? Got an error:

> Could not reach Cloud Firestore backend. Backend didn't respond within 10 seconds.

There was just a kickstarter for actual playing cards. Cool idea making everything online.

https://ultimateplanningpoker.com/

Downloadable: https://github.com/spelinbedrijf/ultimateplanningpoker

I like the clean interface but We’ve been using something quite similar: www.scrum-poker.org

Congrats. You need Jira integration.

Congratulations on launching!

Nicely done

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