Agile Estimate

The app helps Agile teams to increase the precision and speed of relative estimation in story points. It allows to compare and estimate issues on the same screen using a smart drag-and-drop slider.

Comment

Inspiration

The “Eat your own dog food” principle is the best inspiration to create the app, isn’t it? Working with teams as Scrum Masters we struggle with the number of back-and-forth moves we need to make to:

  1. Simply input a value into the “Story Points” field of a Jira issue
  2. Find previously completed issues of each size (1,2,3,5… story point) and do the relative comparison trying to keep all the context in your head.

Relative Estimation (e.g., during Backlog Refinement or Sprint Planning) is a very frequent job-to-be-done that affects a high number of Jira customers - therefore, we believe that we can improve the week-to-week life of many Agile teams.

What it does

The app helps Agile teams to do relative story point estimation.

A user can change the estimate of a Jira issue with a drag-and-drop slider and quickly compare with other reference issues of a similar estimate (usually, those issues have been previously completed by the team).

In such a way, a team can give more accurate estimates. It helps to be focused on estimation: less cognitive effort is spent as fewer details are needed to be held in memory.

How we built it

We decided to verify the promise that 'Forge makes it possible to build a fully-functional app in just a few hours'. As a result, the first MVP version was created in 5 days and planned scope for hackathon was delivered in 2 weeks. Key points:

  • Agile Estimate implements the UI built with Forge custom UI
  • The custom UI was created using Atlassian Design system (@atlaskit) with react.js, typescript and css modules in hand.
  • The application does not store any data. It works only with Jira API. There are no third-party system integrations.

Challenges we ran into

The MVP scope was developed using forge tunnel. When we deployed and installed the app without tunnel the two issues popped up:

  • Not working react routing
  • Crashed Icons (on pages with route other than root)

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The hypotheses behind Agile Estimate idea were tested out and successfully validated in a week:

After the Atlassian Forge has been studied using official resources one engineer managed to deliver a clickable Agile Estimate MVP version in 1 week. This fact enabled us to conduct a few rounds of the user testing sessions (internal) just in 5 days after the UI\UIX mockup presentation. The application is delivered using a modern tech stack and is a good basement for the Agile Estimate evolution.

What we learned

Atlassian Forge platform capabilities and plans for the future. Platform is a good choice to launch the products fast (at least when it comes to small and medium size projects)

What's next for Agile Estimate

  1. Ability to mark as favourites Jira issues chosen by Agile team as the gold standard of estimation. For example, the team may want to have few favourite Stories of 1 story point, few favourite Stories of 2 story points, and do relative estimation by comparing to these favourite Stories.
  2. Add support for T-shirt relative estimation system (XS, S, M, L, XL…).
  3. Add Planning Poker exercise.

Built With

Share this project:

Updates