🃏 New Plugin: Pointing Poker — Turn Refinement into a Team Game #10331

[acierto]

Hey, I just made a Pull Request!

Summary

This PR introduces Pointing Poker, a complete collaborative story-point estimation experience for Backstage.

It keeps the full refinement loop inside the developer portal: teams select a focused set of issues, discuss each ticket with its tracker context visible, vote privately, reveal together, resolve differences, and write the agreed estimate back to the issue tracker.

The first provider is Jira, while the backend exposes a ticket-provider extension point so the community can add other trackers without coupling them to the core session engine.

30-second walkthrough

Watch the narrated Pointing Poker walkthrough

Overview

The Overview is the starting point: it explains the refinement loop, shows a sample consensus, links directly to session setup, and gives teams a quick view of supported providers and deck configuration.

Minimal Jira configuration

After registering the frontend plugin, backend plugin, and Jira module, this is all the runtime configuration required to make Pointing Poker work with Jira:

pointingPoker:
  jira:
    host: https://YOUR_COMPANY.atlassian.net
    email: ${JIRA_USER_EMAIL}
    apiToken: ${JIRA_API_TOKEN}

The email and API token are supplied to the Backstage backend through environment variables and are never exposed to the frontend.

Why this belongs in Backstage

Estimation is collaborative developer work, but it is commonly fragmented across an issue tracker, a video call, a separate poker tool, and team notes. Pointing Poker brings that workflow to the same portal where teams already discover ownership and software context.

The plugin gives the community:

• a practical team-collaboration workflow, not only another catalog visualization;
• private voting that reduces anchoring and groupthink;
• issue context beside the table, reducing tab switching and context loss;
• team discovery and participant identity from the Backstage catalog;
• configurable refinement queries and voting decks per team;
• a reusable provider contract for adding non-Jira issue trackers;
• durable session history for understanding past decisions and improving refinement quality.

User workflow

1. Start from a focused refinement queue

Teams configure JQL and select only the issues that belong in the session—the plugin does not require loading the entire backlog.

2. Keep ticket context beside the table

Descriptions, acceptance criteria, subtasks, attachments, comments, and reporter context remain visible during discussion. Participants can comment or mark work as not ready without leaving the session.

Each story has a spokesperson on the tribune. The ticket creator presents by default; if they are absent, anyone at the table can click I'll present it and take over.

3. Vote privately and reveal together

Participants choose from a team-configured deck. Estimates remain hidden until everyone has voted, then reveal automatically.

The result view shows the distribution, average, spread, outliers, and discussion prompts. The team can re-vote or accept the agreed value, which the provider writes back to Jira.

4. Revisit decisions

History records completed sessions, story outcomes, and discussion time so teams can review previous estimates and prepare better refinement sessions.

Plugin experience

The frontend includes:

• an overview and narrated walkthrough;
• team-aware session creation and lobby discovery;
• saved JQL, ticket preview, and selective inclusion;
• participant avatars, host/observer roles, and a presenter tribune;
• private voting, automatic reveal, consensus analysis, and re-voting;
• comments, mentions, subtasks, attachments, and not-ready handling;
• accepted estimate write-back;
• session history and per-story timing;
• team settings for JQL, card decks, and avatars.

Architecture

Package	Responsibility
@backstage-community/plugin-pointing-poker	Frontend page, session experience, settings, and history
@backstage-community/plugin-pointing-poker-backend	Session persistence, voting API, lifecycle, and ticket-provider extension point
@backstage-community/plugin-pointing-poker-jira	Jira search, issue context, comments, and story-point write-back
@backstage-community/plugin-pointing-poker-common	Shared provider contracts and domain types

The backend's pointingPokerTicketProviderExtensionPoint accepts implementations of the shared TicketProvider contract. Jira is delivered as a separate backend module, demonstrating how future Linear, GitHub Issues, Azure DevOps, or other providers can integrate without changing the core plugin.

Validation

• yarn tsc:full with strict dependency declaration checking
• Repository pre-commit ESLint and Prettier checks
• 6 focused unit tests covering vote enrichment, optimistic local votes, unanimous consensus, numeric spread/outliers, and non-numeric cards
• Manual end-to-end validation against Jira: query → session → spokesperson → voting → reveal → accept/write-back → history
• Walkthrough verified at 1920×1080 with H.264 video, AAC narration, and WebVTT captions

✔️ Checklist

• A changeset describing the change and affected packages.
• Added or updated documentation.
• Tests for new functionality and regression-sensitive voting analysis.
• Screenshots attached for the UI changes.
• All commits have a Signed-off-by line in the message.

[backstage-goalie]

Changed Packages

Package Name	Package Path	Changeset Bump	Current Version
app	workspaces/pointing-poker/packages/app	none	v0.0.1
backend	workspaces/pointing-poker/packages/backend	none	v0.0.1
@backstage-community/plugin-pointing-poker-backend	workspaces/pointing-poker/plugins/pointing-poker-backend	minor	v0.1.0
@backstage-community/plugin-pointing-poker-common	workspaces/pointing-poker/plugins/pointing-poker-common	minor	v0.1.0
@backstage-community/plugin-pointing-poker-jira	workspaces/pointing-poker/plugins/pointing-poker-jira	minor	v0.1.0
@backstage-community/plugin-pointing-poker	workspaces/pointing-poker/plugins/pointing-poker	minor	v0.1.0