Full House

Inspiration

Agile teams often struggle with efficient sprint planning, especially when estimating task complexity and when the teams are big eg: Sameday, Regista. Traditional methods like planning poker help facilitate better discussions, but context-switching between tools breaks the flow. We wanted to bring the planning poker experience directly into Jira, where teams already collaborate, making estimation seamless and engaging within the platform they use daily.

What it does

Our app integrates planning poker directly into Jira issues, allowing teams to collaboratively estimate story points in real-time. Users can initiate a poker session, cast their votes anonymously, and reveal results together. The final consensus is automatically synced with the Jira issue’s story points field. This reduces friction, boosts engagement, and fosters better estimation discussions—all within Jira.

How we built it

We used Atlassian Forge Custom UI to develop the app, ensuring tight integration with Jira Cloud. The UI is built with React and Atlaskit components for a native Jira experience. Real-time collaboration is powered by Forge storage APIs and WebTriggers. For scalability and simplicity, we leveraged Forge’s serverless architecture, eliminating infrastructure overhead.

Challenges we ran into

Authentication & Permissions: Navigating Atlassian’s OAuth flow and ensuring proper access scopes for all users was tricky, especially during development mode restrictions.

Real-time Sync: Handling vote updates in real-time without native WebSocket support required creative use of Forge’s APIs and periodic polling strategies.

User Experience in Jira UI: Keeping the app lightweight yet interactive within Jira’s UI constraints was a constant balancing act.

Learning Forge Limitations: Some platform limitations (like storage quotas and API rate limits) required us to rethink parts of the implementation.