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Hi Miro Community,

 

We’re so excited to let you know that the Estimation app is now available to all users on paid plans! 

The estimation process is designed to help your team predict the amount of effort required to bring a project across the finish line ― often used in Agile product development practices. 

Our new Estimation app lets you add more to structure the process, increase the accuracy of your estimates, and gives everyone a voice with votes. 

  • Create Miro sticky notes and cards, or bring Jira development tasks onto a Miro board to make it easier to estimate, and add design files or diagrams for more visual context

  • To make the estimation process more inclusive, give everyone an opportunity to cast a vote, empowering individuals and sidestepping the bias of group thinking

  • Once voting is done, you can start an agreement session to go through results and focus on the tasks where team members disagree

  • Remove the hassle of manually updating estimates in Jira and sync them with the click of a button

Visit this Help Center article to learn more and don’t forget to let us know what you think once you’ve tried it! 

 

Happy estimating,

Jenny

Hi Jennifer
thanks, good idea! Would like to add Azure DEVOPs sync, additionally to Jira to your roadmap.

Expectation easy sync between DEVOPS and Miro: I can drop some PBIs to Miro, do the estimation and best case the estimation appears in DEVOPS. Do not know, if this is possible at all, but that would be my usecase...

Best regards

Reimar


Dear Miro Team,

I suggest to rethink the necessity for an estimation feature. For a couple of years now there is an ever-growing share among “leading” agile coaches and developers who argue against estimates that surely you also have come across. Let’s mention Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, Allan Holub, Tom Ottinger, Alistair Cockburn, J.B. Rainsberger, Vasco Duarte, etc. to name just a few.

 

Estimates aren’t necessary for being agile and they don’t contribute to become more agile. What I have observed so far is that whenever teams estimated their work these estimates sooner or later leaked to management and were there taken at face value - with all the subsequent hassle one would expect. This is harmful to teams.

Jira has been offering estimates for years and recently - giving in to pure ridiculousness - also introduced decimals for estimates. As if estimates are some sort of scientific measure. They are not. Virtually all other task management tools do the same. But Jira and many colleagues are not a tool well suited for agile teams. Full disclaimer: I once was also strongly in favor of estimates and even took video courses from Mike Cohn on how to improve estimates. Improving estimates is not valuable work. Estimating is not valuable work either.

The “inventor” of Story Points, Ron Jeffries, is even slighty sorry for inventing them given how points are being misunderstood and misused in modern SW development: https://ronjeffries.com/articles/019-01ff/story-points/Index.html- geometry dash

 

Miro has been my favorite tool for workshops over the last four years or so and introducing estimation will not change that. Yet I would advocate to NOT become another task management tool.

Thanks!


Custom estimates please! Silly to try to force Fibonacci on everyone. Please allow estimation pre-sets to be configurable by board, or configurable at estimation time by voters. 


Can it count the total votes? (sum of votes on all cards / all cards in a region). This is an absolute necessity for me. Otherwise, we’ll continue to use Excel or Jira for this...


@Jasmine Friedrich that would be an interesting update to the Kanban function in MIRO if it was able to total based on SP.


I think that whomever initiates the voting session should have the ability to enable anonymous voting or by username. This way there is a choice. I can see both sides of the argument as to why anonymous and why some would prefer transparency.

We’re exploring some options for more configurability here – thanks again for the feedback!


@Peter Parkes  The opportunity for asynchronous voting is a great enabler here. Already provided this feedback before but I think that whomever initiates the voting session should have the ability to enable anonymous voting or by username. This way there is a choice. I can see both sides of the argument as to why anonymous and why some would prefer transparency.


The coffee cup is a signal which a team member would use to let the team know that they’ve been estimating for long enough and its time for a break (coffee or otherwise)

Got it – thanks! The way we’ve built the app also allows for asynchronous ‘voting’, and then synchronous agreement. You can start the process and let people vote in their own time, and then get together to discuss and agree estimates.

 

Multiple boards could be used but its a kludgy solution as I’d need to direct learners to go to a different board specifically for their breakout team and then come back to the main board. I’ve found that multiple boards tend to create a lot of confusion for learners. I’ve used links to make it easy to go from one to the other but it still isn’t as easy as doing it on a single board.

Very clear – thanks!


@Peter Parkes -

  1. The coffee cup is a signal which a team member would use to let the team know that they’ve been estimating for long enough and its time for a break (coffee or otherwise)
  2. Multiple boards could be used but its a kludgy solution as I’d need to direct learners to go to a different board specifically for their breakout team and then come back to the main board. I’ve found that multiple boards tend to create a lot of confusion for learners. I’ve used links to make it easy to go from one to the other but it still isn’t as easy as doing it on a single board.

Kiron


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