Parabol is an agile meeting tool that helps scrum masters lead their teams through the right conversations.
Try a lightweight estimation process that integrates with Jira for free. Early Access is open now:
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Parabol brings your planning poker cards into a virtual meeting space. Each participant sees the issue being estimated and has a tidy deck of cards to select from, just like in a conference room. Everyone looks at the same story, and has the same cards to choose from.
No more scrambling to get everyone looking at the right thing, struggling to count in-person and remote votes or worrying about keeping it fair - everyone is on an equal footing from the start.
With our Slack integration, team members are even alerted when the meeting starts.
As you estimate effort, participants can see the title and description of the story, and pick from a familiar deck of cards, including Questions or Pass.
While you can see who has voted, you can't see what selections they made. Hidden voting prevents team members from anchoring each other.
Sprint Poker gives you the opportunity to arrive at better estimates.
You won't have to worry about counting fingers or writing down votes in a hurry. Once the whole team has voted, everyone can see the overall distribution of votes, the most common estimate, and how each person voted.
Use the built-in discussion threads to add comments, make note of important details or ask a question without interrupting the conversation. Use emoji to react to important comments or suggestions you like. If you’re working across time zones, you can even use the discussion threads to discuss each estimate asynchronously.
Just select the estimate you've decided on, and you're done.
Search for the right stories using a basic search or Jira Query Language, then select the stories you want to estimate. The title and description sync right into Parabol, so as you move through your meeting, the whole team can see which story you’re discussing.
That means no more copying and pasting story details from your backlog into your estimation tool, or keeping multiple windows open side-by-side and toggling through them to get the information you need.
When you're done, your story point estimates automatically sync back to the correct Story Points field in Jira.
When your tasks are automatically synced back to Jira it means less work for the team lead, and fewer errors in recording estimates.
If you're estimating something other than story points, Parabol offers a custom mapper so you can update any Jira field.
The best planning poker meetings happen when the team has a robust discussion about what a story means, how to navigate its challenges, and what the scope truly means.
To start off on the right foot, get your team talking with an icebreaker question. Let Parabol randomly select a question, refresh if you want another option, or fill in your own.
If you’re not a fan of icebreakers or your team is already talkative, you can skip this part and get straight to estimating.
Parabol sends all team members a summary of the meeting when it’s over, including each story, the final estimate for that story, the total story points estimated and the team’s velocity (for context). Your whole estimation meeting is documented, with no additional work.
You can share the summary with others across the organization, or export your learnings as a CSV to analyze trends, upload them into another tool, or share with another group.
Since Parabol’s planning poker meetings don’t require a note-taker, everyone can contribute with their full brain power. Leave the note-taking to us.
Different agile estimation techniques suit different types of planning meetings. Perhaps you use t-shirt sizing to estimate epics, but prefer the Fibonacci sequence for stories?
The choice is yours:
You can also share custom agile estimating techniques across your organization, to get everyone using the same custom scale. Or share them with the public, to inspire other agile development teams around the world.
© 2021 Parabol
