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Agile Poker 2.0. The breakthrough release.

Agnieszka Józwiak
Agnieszka Józwiak
Sep 24th, 2015

It was high noon somewhere on the Atlassian Marketplace when Agile Poker met Agile Estimates and said "This ecosystem is too small for the both of us". And so Agile Poker 2.0 was born.

We're proud to announce that this week we've released the breakthrough, brand new Agile Poker 2.0. It combines the best features of two of our currently available add-ons, Agile Poker and Agile Estimates. Here's the story behind this release:

Agile Poker, the Spartez-made add-on which implements the well known estimating methodology for Agile teams, has been available on the Atlassian Marketplace for almost four years now. While the number of its users grew - as of today customers have installed Agile Poker in at least 189 active instances - it was becoming more and more clear to us that this add-on was facing a number of problems which were preventing it from being awesome. In an attempt to address these problems six months ago we created a brand new add-on, Agile Estimates for Jira, which was completely independent from Agile Poker, had a pristine architecture and UX design and a goal to validate our ideas without impacting the current users of Agile Poker.


Agile Poker main menu available from the Jira Agile Backlog view.


To our satisfaction, Agile Estimates (after we've solved some of its initial bugs ;-)) received approving feedback from its early adopters, but quickly it also became apparent, that the new add-on was missing a few features which were highly valued by the existing Agile Poker customers. Ultimately, to prevent both add-ons and their users from suffering and confusion which product to use, we've decided to take the best from both and deliver the outcome as a new version of Agile Poker - Agile Poker 2.0

The new Agile Poker 2.0 offers some exciting features:

  • seamless integration with Jira Agile, including automatic board updates which allow for running estimations in Agile Boards
  • public and private sessions support "open for everyone" and "invitation only" concepts
  • support for sessions with and without Scrum Master, facilitating both moderated and free-form planning sessions
  • built-in timers to make discussions and estimations more disciplined and timeboxed.

Selecting session mode and inviting participants in the Manage session panel.


By comparison to the existing Agile Poker and Agile Estimates features the main changes in functionalities are:

  • instant chat has been removed; you can now edit live issue description or comments in the detail view panel, description and comment changes are updated automatically
  • the agreed estimate value is saved to the estimate field as chosen in your Jira Agile board
  • there are no explicit per-role usage restrictions; any user with access to the board can join public sessions, but only participants can join private sessions
  • no Pending/In progress/Archived sessions; all sessions are now in one list in Agile Board
  • no start session date; session is always open
  • no email notifications about starting the session, as the session is started once it's created
  • no need to preselect issues to be estimated; any issues that are visible in your backlog can be estimated (issues are selected during each session)
  • sessions exist in the board scope rather than project now; sessions are designed to be reused by teams during estimating sessions
  • vote values configurable per-board instead of globally

More information about this big change and FAQs can be found in the Agile Poker 2.0 release notes.

The existing Agile Poker clients need only to update their add-on; as for the Agile Estimates users, we will be reaching out to them separately to make their transition from their currently used plugin to Agile Poker 2.0 as smooth as possible. Once the transition is completed, Agile Estimates will disappear as an independent offering and the only available - and naturally, the best! - product for agile estimations will be Agile Poker for Jira.

You can download Agile Poker for Jira 2.0 from the Atlassian Marketplace. For Agile Poker 2.0 to work properly Jira 6.0 or newer is required, with Jira Agile (the newest version is always supported) installed.Asynchronous Agile Poker for Jira session in progress.