Intro

If you work in distributed team and do planning sessions try tool that was written a year ago by my trainees in EUVIC. We’ve got 3rd version published at the moment. I hope you can find it useful 🙂

This article shows only basic info about EPoker features.

Motivation

I’m aware that out there are some tools very similar to epoker. Why we did our own? We had a couple of requirements which were not covered by any of existed solutions together:

• I don’t want to create any login by default to play – because often, I have to use it with external customers (POs), sometimes I need to convince them to use planning sessions, and every additional step is a bottleneck.
• I can’t put any business data into external system – and a lot of these tools require to put title or description of every user story. Usually I do planning sessions using online tool + voice call. We discuss using voice call and online tool should be only replacement for “table and cards”.

Basically epoker:

• Do not require any sign-up or other registration process. It’s just ready to use.
• Don’t need to store any business data. And you don’t need to believe me. You just don’t put any business data. Moreover even information about poker sessions are stored only while particular room exists. Room and all info are just deleted after 15 minutes of last connection to it.
• Don’t use any kind of user-tracking system. The only stats which i have is number of rooms created per hour/day and average number of participants.

How to start?

It’s really simple! Go to http://epoker.euvic.pl website and click “Create Room” button. Now copy current page address and send it over to you colleagues you want to play with. That’s it.

Basic features

• Room creator starts as administrator, but can give this permission to anyone in room by clicking right mouse button on any other player and use option “Give master“. In case you have master permission already you can take it from someone using “Revoke master” option

• Anyone could be a Voter (by default), but at any time you can start play as a watcher. It’s very usable for POs and ScrumMaster which don’t vote on any card, just watch the game. If you want to stop be able to vote just click on “Voter” button

• New deal – if you are still playing in the same game but without success on shared estimation you should start new deal. If team agreed on any value then press “New Story“ button instead

• You can use “Revoke” button to show all cards at any time if you have master permission

• You can change card deck between games, there are 3 options at the moment:
  1. Default planning poker deck – 0, 0.5, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20, 40, 100, ?, break
  2. Powers of two – 0, 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, ?, break
  3. T-Shirts – XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL, ?, break
• Everyone can change the theme from light to dark one at any time

• You can change your display name at any time. Epoker will save your choice in cookie so it will be automatically used for you next time

Advanced features

There are a few more advanced and features. However, they are valuable only within specific business context, that’s why I would like to describe them in 2nd part providing additional information when to use them 🙂 Stay tuned!