Parabol brings your Planning Poker cards into a virtual meeting space. Each participant sees the issue being estimated and has a tidy card deck to select from. Everyone looks at the same user story in real-time, and has the same cards to choose from, no matter if you're the product owner, developer or scrum master.
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 Parabol's Slack integration, scrum team members are even alerted when the meeting starts.
Sprint Poker offers a new kind of agile planning and backlog refinement meeting for remote teams.
See the title and description of each story as you estimate, and pick your story points estimate from a familiar card deck, including a Question and Pass card.
Sprint Poker users can see who has voted, but you can't see what poker card they have chosen. Hidden estimation prevents agile team members from anchoring each other. When everyone's made their effort estimation, the cards are revealed.
Sprint Poker helps your team arrive at better and more informed estimates.
You won't have to worry about counting fingers or recording votes in a hurry. Once the whole team has chosen their poker card, 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 in a distributed team, you can use the built-in discussion threads to discuss each estimate asynchronously.
Discuss your estimates to reach a consensus. If you need to revise your initial estimate, you can do that in a matter of seconds by choosing a different card.
When you're all set, just select the final estimate and it's ready to be taken forward for sprint planning or added directly to the sprint backlog.
Search for the right stories or issues from your backlog management tool, then select the product backlog items 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 poker estimation session, or keeping multiple windows open side-by-side and toggling through them to get the information you need. The description from Jira or GitHub and acceptance criteria will pop up in Parabol so the entire team can refresh their memory before choosing their estimate.
When you're done, your story point estimates automatically sync back to the correct Story Points field in Jira, or as a label or comment in GitHub.
When your estimates are automatically synced back to the integrated backlog management tool (Jira or GitHub), it means less work for the team lead, a more organized backlog for the dev team, 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. If your team realizes there's a takeaway task, you can add that directly from Parabol too.
The best Planning Poker ™️ sessions happen when the team has a robust discussion about what a story means, how to navigate its challenges, and what the scope truly means.
Get your team talking with an icebreaker question to set the tone of the meeting. 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 playing Sprint Poker.
Like the idea of icebreakers? Try Parabol's retrospective or check-in tool, which are also free and have built-in icebreakers.
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? Agile estimating doesn't have to be boring. We've got agile estimation scales for stories of any complexity.
The choice is yours:
You can also share custom agile estimation techniques across your organization, to get everyone using the same custom scale. Or share them with the public, to inspire other agile software development teams around the world.