Hours estimate Voting tool

[John Bolton]

Hello, Are there any tools in Jira which provide for hours voting by the team when estimating stories? 

When we are sprint planning, I'd like a tool where developers can enter an estimate for a story so we can easily see the hours estimates. Thank you,

[Stuart Capel - London · Accepted solution]

Hi @John Bolton 

It's a great idea, but not something that you can do as part of the features included out of the box with Jira. 

I tend to do estimation as part of a group workshop so that the estimates get put into Jira all in one go, I feel like some of my teams would not get round to doing it if they had to go and do it on their own.

Having said that it would be great to have an add-on that allows everyone to input their estimates without others seeing it, and then discuss to pick a consensus. It would save us all entering estimates into a poll on Google meet.

There are many add-ons on the marketplace for 'planning poker' type approaches - you might want to have a look here

[Alex David]

Hey John, before you settle on anything, the detail I'd check is where the agreed number actually ends up. Stuart is right that you'll want an app for this, and the thing that decides how much re-typing you're left with is whether the tool writes the result into Jira's time tracking fields or just keeps it in its own storage. A plain number custom field is fine, by the way, automation can read that and copy it into Original Estimate in two actions. What you can't work with is a number that never becomes a Jira field at all, because JQL, boards and reports have no way to reach it.

One follow-on for an hours team. Getting hours into Original Estimate doesn't change your reports on its own. Sprint Report, Burndown and Velocity read whichever Estimation Statistic the board is set to, and Scrum boards default to Story Points, so someone has to switch that to Original Time Estimate in board settings. Check time tracking is enabled globally and the Time Tracking field is on the screen too, a missing screen is the usual reason an app or a rule fails to set an estimate. And the value is stored in seconds and rendered against your working-hours setting, so 1d comes back as 8h rather than 24h.

Full disclosure, I work on Planning Poker for Jira at ChefStackz. It has an hours deck, votes stay hidden until you reveal them, and it writes the agreed number back to Time Tracking: https://marketplace.atlassian.com/apps/1669794434/planning-poker-for-jira

If you're running sessions by hand in the meantime, the low-tech version is everyone writing their number down before anyone says one out loud. Most of the benefit, nothing to install.

Alex