
Show HN: Planning poker online – estimate tasks without influencing others - MiquelLHC
https://planningpokeronline.com/
======
MiquelLHC
I am super excited to share with you the project I've been working on since
January!

Planning poker, also called Scrum poker, it is a simple cards game where teams
can estimate the effort of tasks in software development.

The goal of the app is to allow remote teams to play it in a simple and funny
way.

It is used by 1k daily users and we are getting the first premium
subscriptions.

We want to keep improving it so any feedback is appreciated.

Tech stack (my favourite as it is super agile): \- React (CRA with typescript)
\- Firebase \- Stripe

~~~
nautilus12
My issue with planning poker (and estimates in general) is that there is still
a social pressure to push your estimates down as far as possible and ignore
reality. I still think deadlines and limiting scope is the way to go.

~~~
alistairSH
How do you fix the deadline and scope without estimates?

Within my teams, estimating doesn't appear to have downward pressure. Team
members appear to want to estimate correctly because they want to have a
realistic and steady workload. Driving down estimates means their workload
goes up (at least in the short term, until our average velocity adjusts).

~~~
yachtman
Estimates for anything sufficiently complex are pure fantasy. They just serve
to place an engineer in a bargaining conundrum and makes them implicitly
decrease the scope for the 1000's+ decisions they will need to make during the
course of implementation that they are not going to deliver the desired (also
implicit) expectations. Its better to work from deadlines, then at least the
engineer can try to hedge down the scope and deliver something they are
comfortable with.

------
dgorges
This is really cool! How many votings are included in the free version? That
would be interesting to know before we can test it in our team.

Sidenote: Planning poker is a registered trademark [1]. I hope you don't run
into any legal issues.

[1]
[http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=3473287&caseType=US_REGIST...](http://tsdr.uspto.gov/#caseNumber=3473287&caseType=US_REGISTRATION_NO&searchType=statusSearch)

~~~
MiquelLHC
We still haven't a good defined limit, but it should be enough for most of the
meetings.

Thanks for legal advertisment.

------
glaive123
Thought this was about actual poker, took me a minute to get it.

Having the word Scrum and Agile on the homepage, explaining the problem and
solution statement could help a lot.

~~~
halgir
I think selling teams on the idea of planning poker is out of scope for this
project. It's my impression that most devs and product people are already
familiar with it, but that's just my own anecdata.

For those who know what planning poker is, the landing page is very clear.

~~~
mumblemumble
Yep, planning poker is something I'd expect most people to encounter within
their first day of direct contact with Scrum.

More generally: Tech is absolutely rotten with jargon, most of which is
assembled from pre-existing words that have different meanings in their
original context. I don't think it does us much use to complain about this
fact whenever we get tripped up by it. Nobody wants to have to always define
the context of their jargon before using it in order to avoid confusion any
more than they want to use XML Schema and qualify the names of their tags at
all times. It would just be a horrible chore. It will be quicker and easier
for everyone if we just learn these bits of jargon ad-hoc, and accept the
occasional moments of mild confusion as part of the job.

------
lukeholder
I have no idea what this is? What is an 'estimate' referring to, online poker?
The image seems to make it look like a robot helps you estimate the amount you
should bet when playing poker?

~~~
joshschreuder
It's an estimation technique used in agile development.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_poker)

------
ozim
Execution is nice but last weeks we found jira "agile poker" plugin that you
can do estimations asynchronously. Other people don't see your estimations and
you can do your estimations whenever you feel like it. Also all the stories
and descriptions are visible in one place. So unfortunately this tool is not
an improvement for me.

~~~
woodrowbarlow
do you like the asynchronous nature?

for me, the most valuable part of planning poker is when we see one vote
that's way out of line with the rest, and that person explains their thinking,
and some important discussion can take place. with asynchronous voting, i
would imagine you'd get a fair bit of "oh, yeah, to be honest i don't remember
why i gave that one an XL".

to be honest, i don't even see the point of keeping votes anonymous. if
there's enough judgement in the room that people are ashamed to honestly say
how difficult a task would be for them, i think that's a larger problem.

~~~
alistairSH
_i don 't even see the point of keeping votes anonymous_

Judgement is potentially a problem.

But, beyond that, seeing votes could lead more timid team members to simply
wait for the tech lead (or a boisterous team member) to vote and follow along.

~~~
woodrowbarlow
oh, we do "put the card face down in front of you and we all turn them over at
once".

------
plasma
Nice one, a few quick thoughts after playing for 2 mins tops (so take with
some salt!):

1\. When all players in the game have voted, just turn the cards to show the
results right away

2\. The tutorial moving around the screen was only ever so slightly annoying,
wish it stayed in the one spot (or let me advance using arrow key on keyboard
or something?) so I could just click through and read faster

3\. I assume the link we get given is persistent and never expires? We'd want
to have it as part of a recurring slack call for example without having to
generate a new one each week.

EDIT: 4. I didn't think to click my username arrow to see all the menu options
(especially 'Go unlimited') you may want to consider making at least that a
bit more prominent.

Nice work.

~~~
MiquelLHC
Thank you so much for your feedback, it is well appreciated and we will think
about it.

About point 3: yes, game urls are persistent and never expire but only in
premium version, for free users games expire after a certain amount of
votings. (Only game's creator needs to be premium)

Thanks for your time!

------
halgir
This is great. Clean landing page, easy to get started, simple and transparent
pricing. Doesn't solve an enormous problem, but scratches an itch that's just
annoying enough to justify the price.

I've shared it internally, excited to see if teams decide to use it. So far
we've seen everything from spreadsheets to physical cards being used.

Congrats!

~~~
MiquelLHC
Thank you! Very nice comment, I appreciate it :)

------
thatguyagain
I had no idea what this was about until I read your comment here that it was
about scrum and work related. My first guess was that you would watch poker
games and try to guess the outcome. I don't know if I'm just stupid (very very
possible), otherwise my feedback would be to illustrate/explain/communicate
more and better :)

~~~
taigi100
Same here. I would advice the owner to change the way he markets this a little
bit. Maybe mention the words Agile or Scrum at least.

~~~
dgorges
Planning Poker is a well known term in the agile development / scrum world. If
you don't do scrum, you're probably not in the target group.

~~~
loriverkutya
I had been doing scrum in the last 10 years, poker and online sticks out so
much that I didn’t realised that it has to do anything with scrum before I
clicked.

~~~
thatguyagain
Same here.

------
yeahgoodok
It would be nice if the results were anonymized so that people can voluntarily
explain their high estimate. This is useful in highly politicized environments
in which managers make fun of and pressure individual people for voting
higher.

------
_0ffh
Hmmm, now and then I stumble over links that just won't work on Firefox, even
with uBlock and uMatrix disabled. Here's one, I click "Start quick game", and
all I get is black. Is this normal or an exception?

~~~
MiquelLHC
are you using some kind of firewall? Some users are facing problems when using
them

~~~
_0ffh
Really not anything beyond the mentioned plugins. On my old system, I could
open the offending pages in Chromium and they'd usually work there. On my new
one I have no second browser yet, because my distro is Ubuntu-based and I've
purged the snap bs.

------
agilebyte
[https://tools.wmflabs.org/hatjitsu](https://tools.wmflabs.org/hatjitsu) is a
free alternative that highlights if there are any differences among revealed
points.

------
trickstra
> Uncaught DOMException: Failed to read the 'localStorage' property from
> 'Window': Access is denied for this document.

White page.

No, I won't allow localStorage just to see your homepage.

------
barbarbar
Would you like this used by a construction company that were to renovate your
house/apartment? Would it work for that?

------
dwerthen
Really nicely built! I am definitely using this the next time I'm doing a
sprint planning session. Thanks for sharing

~~~
MiquelLHC
Cool! I am glad you like it!

------
devbas
Did we hug it to death? Got an error:

> Could not reach Cloud Firestore backend. Backend didn't respond within 10
> seconds.

------
mikecoles
There was just a kickstarter for actual playing cards. Cool idea making
everything online.

[https://ultimateplanningpoker.com/](https://ultimateplanningpoker.com/)

Downloadable:
[https://github.com/spelinbedrijf/ultimateplanningpoker](https://github.com/spelinbedrijf/ultimateplanningpoker)

------
georgetanv
I like the clean interface but We’ve been using something quite similar:
www.scrum-poker.org

------
sz4kerto
Congrats. You need Jira integration.

------
klausjensen
Congratulations on launching!

------
quickthrower2
Nicely done

