v.1 Shiitake

Hello! Thank you for your interest in Decompery. I have big dreams for a reliable, opinionated set of sprint tools that agile teams everywhere can incorporate into their sprint processes with ease.

The first milestone I’m striving for (which I’m calling v.1 Shiitake) is a free sprint poker replacement. This will supplant the myriad of free sprint poker tools, plagued by ads and bugs, that I have to reach for when my team is in a decomposition meeting and we need to estimate.

There are quite a few of these tools and several plugins for large work management systems, but I have yet to find a reliable, genuine tool that gets the job done quickly. Instead, I’m left with unreliable apps that slow us down and make my team roll their eyes. I’m tired of remembering which app has the least intrusive ads on screen and can pass firewall muster.

Another motivating factor for me to create an entirely new app for sprint tooling comes from years spent refining the decomposition process. I’ve worked with multiple teams, each practicing slightly different sprint ceremonies and processes, and I can contribute back some of these ideas and make them intrinsic to the tooling. Being opinionated will only be for some, but it will allow me to develop a more feature-rich and interoperable set of tools.

For each milestone, there is less of a ship date and more of a feature complete date. Decompery is developed in real-time, and most updates I work on land in production within the hour they’re coded. While I iterate on these early versions, this is a cadence I’d like to maintain for as long as possible. I will, however, mark certain occasions of delivering significant features and use those as north stars for what features to prioritize.

Shiitake has a tentative feature completion date of December 31, 2022. v.2 Crimini targeting Q1 2023 and v.3 Portabello targeting Q2 2023 will follow, and I’ll release a road map for those in the coming weeks.

That said, the road map items for Shiitake are:

Create Decomps with a given topic and give the ability to break it down into Stages.
See every Participant in a Decomp (in real-time).
Allow for deliberations via Fibonacci Story Points (in real-time).
Copy Decomp as Markdown for easy exporting to Jira and other work management systems.
Create a mobile-friendly, clean, and clear UI for all participants.

There are several aspects that I’m specifically not building for Shiitake. The most prominent element that will be missing is an account system. When someone is looking for a quick, free tool for a refinement meeting, the last thing they need is friction getting their team members in the session. While we lose some settings and conveniences with not having accounts, the trade-off for speed and simplicity is vital. I’m excited to build plenty of features that will require accounts, but those will be for future milestones.

The second aspect I’m specifically not targeting is integrations. Jira is the big dog here, but integrations with other platforms are beneficial. Integrating with third parties introduces a host of maintenance and implementation headaches, and I’d rather spend my time making the core Decompery experience fantastic. Hopefully, the export to Markdown feature will be enough for most users now. Both of these aspects (and more!) will be addressed in future releases.

Like any dream, Decompery won’t be built overnight and will need to be tackled piece by piece. As those pieces come together, I’d love to have any and all feedback you have using Decompery. We’ll probably have a more slick way to give feedback in-app at some point, but in the interim, please reach out to me via email with any feature ideas, bugs, compliments, or complaints.

Also, you have my promise that Decompery will always have a killer free offering of any tools we create that prioritize anonymity and speed. This seed of Decompery was a frustration project against the clumsy existing free offerings, and I never want anyone to have that feeling with Decompery. This means that, for now, Decompery stays up through my personal funding and any donations that folks would like to make. In the future, we will have a paid option to help with some server costs.

Again, thank you for joining me on this journey. Happy decomposition 🍄

- Max