Pivotal Tracker: Planning Poker

Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, is a consensus-based technique for estimating, mostly used to estimate effort or relative size of user stories in software development. In planning poker, members of the group make estimates by playing numbered cards in the app, instead of speaking them aloud. The cards are revealed, and the estimates are then discussed. By hiding the figures in this way, the group can avoid the cognitive bias of anchoring, where the first number spoken aloud sets a precedent for subsequent estimates.

Features

• Authentication from Pivotal Tracker
• Displays all user's projects in Pivotal Tracker
• Push Notifications when playing cards
• Bootstrap + Font-Awesome for Responsive Design

Dependencies

• Ruby 2.1.3
• MongoDB
• Twitter Bootstrap
• Font-Awesome
• Pivotal Tracker gem (currently v3)
• Thin webserver for Faye
• Faye for Push Notifications

Frameworks

This application uses the following frameworks:

• Ruby on Rails (4.2.5.1)
• Twitter Bootstrap (Front-end)
• jQuery (Javascript)

Gems

This application uses the following gems:

• Pivotal Tracker (Pivotal Tracker gem)
• Faye (Faye)
• Mongoid (Mongoid)
• Twitter Bootstrap SASS (Twitter Bootstrap port to SASS)
• Font-Awesome (Font-Awesome Rails)
• BackTop (Back To Top functionality)

Getting Started

Planning Poker uses MongoDB as its database. To install it, please refer to the following link:

• Install MongoDB - MongoDB installation tutorial
• Mongoid - Mongoid official website for documentations

Planning Poker uses push notification with Faye. There are configuration files for each environments in config/environments:

config.publisher = {
  # production faye server - change the URL so that it points to the correct server.
  domain: 'localhost:9292',
  # secret key
  secret: 'secret'
}

Change the domain into the actual production domain when deploying the app. You might want to change the secret key as well.

To get started, clone this repository to your local machine, and install dependencies:

git clone [email protected]:bimovidia/planning-poker.git
cd planning-poker
bundle install

Open a new terminal and start the faye server:

rackup faye.ru -s thin -E production -p 9292

Run the application locally with:

rails s

Rule of the Game

Once you have the application set up, you can:

• Login using your Pivotal Tracker credential
• Click any project name in the header menu that has unestimated stories
• Click on UNESTIMATED in the submenu to see the list of unestimated stories for that project
• Click / Expand the story to start the planning poker session

Each estimator can select any point depending on the story scale point setting in pivotal tracker. The values represent the number of story points, ideal days, or other units in which the team agrees to estimate.

The estimators discuss the feature, asking questions of the product owner as needed. When the feature has been fully discussed, each estimator privately selects one card to represent his or her estimate.

Once all selections are in, any estimator can then hit the REVEAL button to reveal the cards at the same time.

If all estimators selected the same value, that becomes the estimate. If not, the estimators discuss their estimates. The high and low estimators should especially share their reasons. After further discussion, once the estimation score has been agreed on, any estimator can then click on any card representing that number. After that, any user can update the story name and description (if necessary) and then hit SAVE to update the story in Pivotal Tracker.

Contributing

Contributions are encouraged. You can contribute in many ways. For example, you might:

• add documentation and "how-to" articles to the README or Wiki
• create an extension that provides additional functionality above and beyond Planning Poker itself
• fix bugs you've found in the Issue Tracker or improve / add new features to Planning Poker

When contributing, you will need to:

• follow the same style / convention used throughout the app (as much as you can)
• make sure your codes are well-tested and reviewed
• when fixing a bug, provide a failing test case that your patch solves
• provide proper documentation when necessary

Copyright

Planning Poker is licensed under the MIT License