Planning poker in the Jira issue view
This feature is available on:
Jira Cloud (i.e. Jira sites with “….atlassian.net” in the URL)
Jira Data Center with app version 14.0.0+
Finding the Planning poker tool
The Planning poker button/panel will show on the issue view in Jira.
Planning poker is only available in Jira Software projects, not Business projects or Jira Service Management projects.
The “Easy Agile Planning Poker” button will be in the “Apps” dropdown on the Jira issue view:
Easy Agile TeamRhythm modules including Planning Poker are under the “Apps” button
Click the button to show the Easy Agile Planning poker panel just above the Activity/Comments section on the page:
(These buttons we previously shown in a row under the issue summary as pictured, but were recently moved.)
Old Jira Cloud issue view buttons
The planning poker tool will show on the Jira issue view.
Scroll to find the Easy Agile Planning Poker panel between the Attachments and Activity sections.
A Jira Administrator can disable planning poker for a whole Jira Data Center site, which removes this panel.
Running planning poker as a team
The Planning Poker panel can auto-update, so you don’t need to refresh the page to see changes made by your teammates.
Vote
Add your estimate for how much work you think this issue will take. Each voting participant adds their estimate in the Jira Issue View. Cast votes may not be deleted but may be changed by submitting a new one to override your other vote.
Votes must be a positive numerical value between 1 - 1000, so your team may use your sequence of choice. For example, 1 to 5, Fibonacci, etc
Easy Agile Planning Poker supports synchronous and asynchronous team estimation as there is no restriction on when a vote can be cast.
Reveal votes
You can see the profile pictures of the teammates who have already voted. Everyone’s votes will be hidden at first.
When everyone has submitted a vote, click “Reveal votes vote for everyone” to see all votes, sorted from lowest to highest.
The avatars and votes will be re-ordered from lowest to highest for easy reference.
Discuss
If all or most estimates match, your team has a shared understanding of the work and you’ve arrived at a good estimate. It is still a good idea to discuss any outliers just in case something has been identified that others have missed. This could make the work easier or more complex. Each person’s experience and capability will impact complexity.
If the votes aren’t matching, that indicates there might be something about this issue that not everyone understands yet. Is there a hidden complexity that only some people have spotted? Is it easier than it looks?
If votes aren’t aligned, we recommend discussing the issue as a team and then re-voting. Use the “Clear all votes” button to clear everyone’s votes and try again after discussing.
Estimate
An Estimate is suggested for the issue based on the most commonly occurring votes determined in the following manner:
where there is only one vote that occurs more than once, this vote will be used
where there are multiple votes occurring multiple times, the vote with the most occurrences will be used
where there are multiple votes occurring multiple times with same number of occurrences, the higher number will be used.
Note: The story points field may be manually updated with the vote agreed by the team if that differs from the suggested estimate.
Add estimate to the issue
If there’s united or most-common estimate, use “Copy to issue’s Story Points” to save it to that field on the issue.
Troubleshooting Planning Poker
“Copy to issue’s Story Points” doesn’t work
If you receive the error message “issue was not updated” click on the message for more information on why the story points may not be updating. Find the error type below to for the recommended action.
Issue Type
This functionality requires the story points field to be visible in the Jira issue viewer and be editable by your user.
Recommended action is to speak to your Jira or project administrator to check these settings.
This error appears for issue types that don’t support estimation tracking, such as epics or higher level issue types. This typically occurs on company managed projects, however this will depend on your issue configuration.
Recommended action is to speak to your Jira or project administrator to verify your issue configuration.
Board and Issue Configuration
This is the default error for Atlassian Jira API errors.
Recommended action is to speak to your Jira or project administrator to validate that the project and issue configurations support story point estimation.
Unsupported Board Types
Currently the “Copy to story points” function is only supported on Scrum only boards (can be either team or company managed).
Recommended action is to switch board types if possible, or manually enter the value into the issue’s story points field.
This feature is not supported within Kanban projects, as Kanban frameworks generally do not support the idea of estimation.
Recommended action is to manually set the story points field if it is being used.