Gamifying Planning Poker
Gamifying Thunderdome
I thought it would be a great exercise to attempt to gamify planning poker. Originally I thought about starting fresh and building an app from the ground up but decided that it would be much more efficient, to begin with, a working planning poker application and add in the gamified elements. After doing some research into planning poker apps that were open source, I found an excellent app that was ready to be Gamified!
Thunderdome is an open-source app (hosted on GitHub) by Steven Weathers. This excellent product is a fully functional planning poker that is hosted by Steven, and is free from ads! Really a great resource for teams using Agile! Thanks, Steven for creating and hosting the site!
Thunderdome is fully functional and it is helpful to use it.
The Goals
The main portion of the site that I’m interested in is the planning poker site (there are other areas of the site.) My goals for applying gamification to the Thunderdome app would be to:
- Increase Loyalty
- Entice players to play it more regularly
- Create a strong community of players
- Increase Value to Companies
- Increase the importance of Teams and Companies
- Make a reason to belong to a community, and to use that feature.
- Improve Users Participation during Planning
- Reward users for participating.
- Greater rewards for participating in a constructive and helpful way
Target Users
The main activity in planning poker is planning, and there are two main user types involved in the activity. The first is the user who is hosting the planning, this user will be adding items to estimate, and clicking buttons to run the battle. The second user type is the estimator user. This person is actually estimating the individual stories with the team. We want to target both user types.
The Plan
The plan is to craft a gamified system based on using the Thunderdome app for planning poker, which will allow us to meet our goals above.
Point System
The point system that will be added will grant users points as they use Thunderdome. There will be three point types, they are gold, silver, and bronze points. Bronze points will be rewarded for regular use of the app. Silver points will be rewarded for the facilitation of the battles. Gold points are earned in competitions, and by the culmination of silver and bronze points. The point values will be configurable, and we can add or remove places to gain points at any time. To being with, we will grant points as shown below.
- 10 bronze points (BP) for voting on a plan during a battle
- 1 bronze point for each user that agrees with your vote
- 5 bronze points for matching the accepted point value
- 10 bronze points for participating in a battle
- 1 silver point for creating a plan in a battle. (1 lost if it is deleted)
- 10 silver points for completing a battle that you created
Leaderboards
Several leaderboards will be created that use the point system and various groupings of users. The first board created will be a leaderboard for all users within a company. This enables users in a company to compete with one another. If a single company is very large, then it would make sense to create leagues so that users would be grouped with similar-performing members so that the competition would be meaningful.
The second leaderboard is a company-vs-company leaderboard. Where companies can opt into the public competition. The board will include all members of the company’s points. To make it fair between companies, the score for any company will be the total points for all active users in the company divided by the number of active users.
Both leaderboards would run a competition each month, and the top competitors win points (gold/silver/bronze) based on their competition. First place in any monthly competition will earn a gold point. Some players in second place will then earn 50 silver points, depending on the size of the leaderboard, second place should be about 10% of the board. Third place would be the 5% below silver, and they would earn 50 bronze points.
Rewards
There may also be a reward system based on the badges and points, where users can unlock additional functionality in Thuderdome based on their score.
Profile
Each user has a profile in Thunderdome, but it is only visible to users who are on your team, or to users where you join the battle/team/organization. This limits the excitement regarding gaining points, as you can not show the points to another user.
Another feature would be to add an option profile page. The user can opt-in using a setting in their profile settings to enable a public profile. Then users can see one another, and users can join public leaderboards and competitions that may be added in the future.
In addition to the public profile, the site would extend its current profile to include the points and badges earned by whoever the name is displayed. Below is the current look of a user in a battle, they are shown with their name and their profile picture, we would add points and badges here.
So now that we know how it would work, let’s talk about why it would work.
