Quick Pointer

Scrum pointing without the drama

I made this real-time collaborative story pointing app because planning poker sites are way too complicated.

12 August 2025

Everyone votes at once, and nobody knows who voted what. Perfect. Everyone votes at once, and nobody knows who voted what. Perfect.

As a team lead at ZayZoon, I run a lot of sprint planning sessions. We usually have quite a lot to cover, so I tend to move quickly. The team had been using Parabol for story pointing before, but I found it too cumbersome. I really just needed the bare minimum: a web app that let people anonymously vote in points, then a way to reveal them all at once.

So I built Quick Pointer.

Resources

Try it out with your team, or fork it and make it your own.

It’s super simple. No accounts, no setup, no admin users. You just open the site and start pointing. The site is completely public, but who cares - we’re literally just picking numbers! As an option, you can paste in a Jira ticket link so that everyone can read it before they vote (which would be inaccessible to anyone who’s not already authenticated with Jira).

The whole thing runs on Rails 8 with Turbo Streams and ActionCable handling the real-time parts. It uses Rails’ in-memory cache instead of a database because there is no need to persist story points for more than a few minutes. Browser sessions track who voted what, so people can change their votes before the big reveal.