See who has estimated before your refinement meeting

The first ten minutes of refinement

Async estimation saves meeting time, but only if you know where the gaps are before you start. Without that, the meeting opens with a round of "did you get to this one?", and the stories nobody has looked at use up the time meant for the ones that need discussion.

Planning Poker shows who has voted on a single story. Across twenty stories in a backlog, that means opening each one.

One field, kept up to date for you

Smart Guess keeps a field called Estimated by on each work item:

• When someone votes, they're added.
• When they remove their vote, they're removed.

Nobody has to maintain it. It answers one question: is this story ready to discuss? It's a view of the process, not a scorecard of the people.

Here's the field on a work item:

See the whole backlog at a glance

Once the field is set up, you don't have to open each story. In company-managed spaces, add it to your backlog cards and every card shows who has estimated:

Team-managed backlog cards can't show custom fields yet. There, add Estimated by as a column in the List view, or, in any space, save a search with an Estimated by column. One click before refinement shows the state of every story:

Set it up

Pick what you need. Each option stands on its own:

• See who has estimated across your backlog: add Estimated by to your backlog cards, or save a search with an Estimated by column.
• Show it on each work item: add Estimated by to the work types you estimate.

Step-by-step instructions for team-managed and company-managed spaces: Estimated by: see who has estimated before refinement.

A pre-refinement routine

1. Two days ahead, send the team the high-priority stories you'll cover in refinement. Ask everyone to review them and vote before the meeting.
2. The day before, open your backlog or saved search and check which of those stories are still waiting for votes.
3. Send a short reminder about the stories that still need votes.
4. In the meeting, work through the stories in priority order. The ones the team has already voted on go faster, because the discussion starts from where the estimates differ.