Estimojo

Planning poker is a small ritual with one rule that matters: nobody should hear a number before they have chosen their own. Do it in a video call and the rule survives on good manners. Do it in a spreadsheet beside the ticket and it does not survive at all, because the estimate then has to be copied back by hand, and whoever copies it can round it.

Estimojo runs the ritual on the ticket itself, inside Jira and inside monday.com. One estimation engine sits behind both: the trackers differ only in a gateway of about a dozen methods, so a rule about voting is written once and behaves the same in either tool.

Nobody sees a number before the reveal

Concealment is not a matter of the interface hiding something it was sent. Before the reveal, the payload a voter’s screen receives carries their own vote and null for everyone else’s. What it does carry is who has voted, so the room can see it is waiting for one person without seeing what the others chose. The computed result and the disagreement flag are both withheld on the same condition. Reveal is a change of the session’s status, and it happens automatically only when the team has turned that on, in which case it fires when the last participant has cast.

What the room agreed, and what it did not

When votes are revealed, the engine works out the most-voted values and then does one of three things. If there is a single most-voted value it is selected and marked as decided by majority. If several values tie, what happens depends on a setting the team picks: one preset takes the highest of the tied values and marks it as decided by a tie-break, and another hands the tie to the coordinator and selects nothing. A third preset is stricter about the first case too: a plurality is not enough, and a value not chosen by more than half the voters is treated as no decision at all. Abstentions are excluded from the arithmetic rather than counted as a low number. And when the spread of the votes is wide, measured as a standard deviation above two, the result is flagged, because a room that agreed on average may not have agreed at all.

Where the panel sits, and who may start

The panel can live in the ticket’s main body, in the side column, or in both, and the choice belongs to the project rather than to the individual. Who may start a session is a setting too: anyone, or only the person the work is assigned to, or only whoever opened the ticket. These look like small choices, but together they decide whose meeting it is: a team where anyone can start has a different habit from one where only the assignee does, and the tool does not choose between them.

Whether the estimate was any good

Estimation is worth measuring only against what happened next. Estimojo records each applied estimate, and it can ask the tracker how long an item took to move between two statuses the team names. Putting the two together gives a chart of estimate against actual duration, over a window of up to twenty-four months. That is the part a retrospective can use: not how quickly the team votes, but whether the numbers it agreed on turned out to mean anything.

Who it is for

Agile teams running estimation in Jira or monday.com who want the number to land on the ticket.

Visit Estimojo: estimojo.bomdisoft.com