Magic Estimations
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Magic Estimations is a handy app that helps agile teams estimate the complexity or effort of user stories quickly and efficiently, supporting Story Points, time estimates, estimates of any other numeric and even text custom fields.
The general concept behind the app is Magic Estimation method (also referred to as Silent Grouping, Affinity Estimation, Relative Estimation, Swimlanes Sizing). The method's main idea is in sorting user stories through a board based on their relative weight.
The app supports 4 different game modes inspired by the most popular estimation frameworks:
Magic Estimations app is really simple and self-explanatory. It is super fast compared to alternatives since it's much easier to make a sizing decision for a user story while comparing it to other cards.
Below you can find an overview of the Magic Estimation method. For the app’s details start with Starting and configuring sessions and Estimation process.
It’s not a secret that nowadays most development teams use effort estimation in Story Points or time to run their iterations. Most of the teams use Planning Poker for that purpose, and our team was among them. We had played numerous games before it gradually started falling out of our favor. And we had reasons for that:
- it’s fast, but not lightning fast: during the Poker sessions, a lot of time is still wasted on getting to a consensus and figuring out how exactly to play the game
- its rules are not intuitive: people need to be thoroughly instructed before they fully understand the rules and the dynamics of the game. What’s worse, it doesn’t seem to improve a lot over time. Should we go for another round? Why don’t we just take the bigger number? No, you can’t just average out, we need to come to a consensus… And it goes on, and on, and on
- not truly relative: in Planning Poker items are estimated one by one and a group is supposed to compare each item to a baseline item, typically a ‘1’, but what is this '1'?
Magic Estimation method might be a better alternative for you since it has those flaws fixed. Magic Estimations is its digital version for Jira Cloud.
The rules are simple: align the cards in groups left to right by size from small to large.
Magic Estimations method is:
| Simple | Lightning fast | Truly relative |
|---|---|---|
| The only thing teams need to know is how to drag cards on the board. | The ability to see all the estimated issues on one board makes every decision much easier and faster. | Don’t think of what Story Points mean, simply compare relative sizes of stories. |
In Magic Estimations we adopted the method described above for the Jira Cloud environment. Don’t hesitate to check it out: Magic Estimations for Jira Cloud — it is free for sites with up to 10 users, and every installation starts with a 30-day trial (see Pricing).