Planning Poker & Agile Apps for the Atlassian Marketplace

Overview

AgilePulse builds Agile tooling that lives inside Jira — no external portals, no context switching, no data leaving your Atlassian environment. Dillon, AgilePulse's founder, came to DevNexus with validated product concepts and user research but needed an engineering partner who actually understood the Atlassian Forge platform. We shipped a suite of apps that now serve thousands of teams globally.

The Challenge

The Atlassian Marketplace is a competitive space, and shipping a Forge-based app well is harder than it looks. The platform is powerful but opinionated — get the architecture wrong early and you're rewriting instead of iterating.

Dillon had a clear vision: Planning Poker that felt native inside Jira, a Sprint Retrospective tool that pulled real sprint metrics automatically, and async estimation modes for distributed teams. The apps needed to be Atlassian-fortified (security review ready), performant on large backlogs with thousands of issues, and genuinely delightful to use — not just functional.

The window was tight. A well-funded competitor had a similar product in the works.

Our Approach

We treated each app as a product, not just a feature build. That meant starting with how teams actually run planning sessions before writing a line of code.

1. Workflow-first design — We mapped real sprint ceremonies: refinement sessions, planning poker rounds, retro formats. The UI patterns came from how teams behaved, not from design conventions.
2. Forge-native architecture — We built entirely on Atlassian Forge, using Forge's UI kit and custom UI where flexibility was needed. This gave us the Atlassian-fortified security badge out of the gate and simplified the certification process considerably.
3. Deep Jira integration — Issues, sprints, story points, and boards are all native Jira data. We didn't build a parallel data model — we extended Jira's own. This meant teams got features like real sprint metrics in retrospectives and reference issues during estimation automatically.
4. Performance at scale — One of the key technical challenges: loading and estimating backlogs with thousands of issues without the UI grinding to a halt. We optimized the data fetching layer to handle this gracefully.

The Apps We Shipped

Planning Poker Agility — The leading free Planning Poker plugin on the Marketplace. Real-time and async estimation modes, reference issues visible during voting, seamless Jira integration. Built for teams that want estimation to feel like a natural part of their Jira workflow, not an interruption.

SprintPoker — An all-in-one estimation tool with AI-assisted insights, real-time and async modes, and deeper sprint planning features for teams running structured refinement ceremonies.

SprintRetro — A Sprint Retrospective tool with built-in sprint metrics pulled directly from Jira. Teams reflect on actual sprint data, not memory. Formats for different retro styles, all inside Jira.

Results

• Marketplace certification passed on first submission across all apps — zero rejections
• 3,000+ installs across the app suite, with continued organic growth from Marketplace discovery
• 4.7/5.0 average rating — users consistently highlight the Jira integration quality and support responsiveness
• Zero critical bugs reported in the first two quarters post-launch
• AgilePulse reached meaningful MRR within months of launch and is now adding new apps to the suite

What Users Are Saying

"Team love it — we used to use an external tool but changed to this as it's all integrated into Jira conveniently."

"Free planning poker tool, best app I found on the Jira Marketplace. Thank you for the fast continued support."

"This app is lightweight and really helpful, fitting well with my workplace's strict standards for Jira addons."

What Dillon Said

"DevNexus understood both the Atlassian ecosystem and our product vision. They didn't just ship apps — they built the foundation we're now growing a business on."
— Dillon, Founder, AgilePulse