Chris Baumgard
By
Chris Baumgard

Our scrum team follows the traditional structure of scrum ceremonies, though we have encountered a challenge with team member engagement. So we started looking for a sprint poker style tool that could help improve engagement, but it needed to have a straightforward interface for providing estimates, and ideally seamless integration with Jira to enhance our workflow.

In our quest for the best tool, there was only one that really stood out. We found a few tools useful that allowed team members to vote on estimates anonymously, though these were lacking in other features we were really hoping for.

Our requirements for a sprint poker tool are not excessive. We needed something that was easy for members to join the session, a simple user interface for casting votes, and preferably something that integrated with Jira.

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Tools that didn’t quite meet our needs

  • Scrum Poker: This is a free tool that allows team members to join per session, and even has integration with Jira. The user interface is not great and the ads can be quite annoying.
  • Planning Poker Online: Another free tool that allows team members to join by session, though there is no integration with Jira. This was one of our more favored tools, though it just feels like a lot is missing.

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Along came Parabol

During our pursuit for improvement, we engaged in discussions with several Five & Done teams. Among their recommendations, Parabol stood out, as another team had discovered it while researching and perusing various articles. Their goal was to enhance their retro meetings as they had become stale. Parabol has enabled more engagement in their team meetings and led to the recommendation for our team as well.

Once incorporating Parabol into our ceremonies, our scrum team has found that it’s a great tool for our needs, particularly the Estimated Effort (sprint poker) feature, which once integrated with Jira, automatically updates the story points on the Jira ticket. Additionally, Parabol provides the ability to pull in the tickets planned for the meeting, eliminating the need to scroll through the backlog; as well as provides a nice summary of the estimated points once complete.

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Based on a series of tasks, we can prioritize which one we will do estimates on.
Photo credit: Parabol

Team members can select their estimate based on a task.
Photo credit: Parabol

A team can provide their estimates on any given task.
Photo Credit: Parabol

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To further enhance our utilization of Parabol, we have begun using the retrospective feature as well. As the team who recommended this tool to us mentioned, this has helped our retros become less stale as well by selecting different templates per retro. Again, we also find the summarization after the ceremony to be useful so we can easily go back and review.

Teams can create notes within the Start, Stop, Continue columns in a retrospective anonymously.
Photo Credit: Parabol

The team has an opportunity to group ideas that are similar to then be voted on to talk about.
Photo Credit: Parabol

Teams can vote on which subject is most important to talk through to share with the team.
Photo Credit: Parabol

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Recommendations

If you are a Project Manager, Scrum Master, or any member of a development team that is in search of an estimation tool, we highly recommend checking out Parabol. While one of the highlights for our team is certainly the integration with Jira, the user interface and the ease of scheduling and joining the meetings in Parabol make it worth your time to check out, even if your projects do not utilize Jira.

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