Agile estimation in Jira Cloud: Async Poker in Foxly ♠️♥️

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Hi, community 🙌

In this article, we'll look at cases when async poker would be a better option for your remote team. And share the solution many of you asked and we delivered ♠️♥️  

Foxly now offers both interactive (online) and asynchronous (offline) planning pokers!

1. Do you have to run cross-department estimation? And sometimes get inaccurate results due to lack of proper context? 
   
   

2. Is it often hard to find a time slot for planning sessions because team members live in different time zones? 
   
   

3. Has your backlog refinement become too lengthy? And you spotted that some of your team members need more time to assess tasks and vote?

If any of these questions ring a bell, read on; we have a solution for you!

We will cover 3️⃣ of the most common cases remote teams deal with when prioritizing in Jira.

1 - Difference in estimation units and metrics across teams

As a Scrum Master or Product Owner, you may want to collect different types of estimates on the same project from different teams or departments.  

For example, your developer team may be out of context for an accurate estimation of potential customer reach or impact of a task. And business teams, on the other hand, often lack the expertise to estimate task effort or confidence in story points. 

2 - Estimation pace and lack of proper context

Some team members may take more time to review the issue for accurate estimation.
It is especially challenging with tasks that have dependencies or a bunch of child issues.  

With online or interactive poker, it’s hard to assess tasks from different perspectives and review the whole context. As the team has to look at one item at a time.

3 - Cross-department prioritization and fully remote teams

We all know, that getting everyone at the same meeting when you have a fully remote team poses a challenge on its own. But if you need to run a cross-department agile poker session and adjust it to your distributed teams, it's close to a nightmare. 

🦊 Foxly’s Async Priority Poker is here to help 

You can spare your stakeholders and teams a lot of meeting time and make sure their votes are counted by just sending them a link to async priority poker session in Jira prior to the meeting.  

This will allow both stakeholders and developers to review and vote on issue priority metrics at their own leisure. And then, you can go through the results and share the results with the teams.

The Priority planning poker game in Foxly app for Jira Cloud is designed to fully cater backlog refinement meetings to distributed teams, both development and business. 

Agile Estimation Techniques for Different Teams: Units and Metrics to Use

With Foxly Async Planning Poker, you can create multiple poker sessions per project and adjust them to different teams. 

Send a separate poker link with different sets of metrics to stakeholders/business teams and development teams, and let them vote on the criteria that matter, in their own time.

You can also choose separate estimation units for different metrics, from story points/numbers to labels, ratings, or short text. 

This will allow your tech teams to vote on task effort/ease and confidence, and your business team to focus only on metrics relevant to their area, such as impact, reach, business value, etc.

Time-efficient Estimation Meetings with Async Poker 

Let Foxly async poker help make your backlog refinement meetings short and efficient. 

Your teams can take advantage of assessing all issues at the same time, and do it at their own pace. Team members can open issues and review all subtasks and dependencies to give their accurate estimates with all the context taken into account.  

 

Thus, you can use the meeting time to discuss the results and listen to the outliers.

Remote Planning and Estimation for Distributed Teams

Tailor your workflows to your fully remote and distributed teams. 

Asynchronous planning poker offers a beautiful solution for that. Just open a game for a day or two, track the progress and then collect the scores. 

Let’s look at a process that can help you set this up.

How to set up and run Async Poker in Foxly?

1. Navigate to Priority Poker in Foxly and start by creating a new poker game. Choose Async poker, name the game and select the metric you want to include. You can select all metrics or a set of metrics, relevant to your team.
   
   Foxly comes with five out-of the box prioritization templates (Value vs. Effort, ICE, RICE, WSJF, and Quick wins), but you can also create your own template with custom metrics and formula.
   
   
   
   
2. Next, you select issues that will be included in your agile poker to be voted on by your team members.
   
   You can also create multiple Jira planning poker games for the same project or set of issues from the backlog to accommodate for different teams’ focus. And share the link with the parties involved.
   When all the issues are estimated, close the voting, review and share the results.
   
   
   
   
3. Keep track of the poker game progress from the admin view or join the game to submit your own votes.
   
   
   
   
4. When all the issues are estimated, close the voting, review and share the results.
   
   

When compared to online/interactive planning poker, where the business and development teams estimate issues one by one across a predefined set of criteria, Foxly’s Async Priority planning poker offers you the opportunity to customize the estimation session to your teams' needs and according to their expertise.

Async Poker allows you to create multiple poker games to involve both stakeholders and developers into backlog prioritization from various angles.

This results in more accurate estimation and better decision-making as to what it is you should work on next.

🦊 Foxly is Backlog Prioritization app for Jira Cloud

If you'd like to give it a try, it's available for a 30-day free trial on Atlassian Marketplace.