Getting Started

For quick help, type /groomba help in Slack. To reach us, email hello@groomba.ai or use /groomba feedback.

Creating a team

/groomba new-team

A Groomba team contains your team's estimation participants and settings for how you want to estimate issues.

In team settings, you can configure:
  • The pointing scale you will use
  • Reminder/notification frequency
  • Averaging method
  • Backlog location in Jira
  • Auto-polling

There are two commonly used fields in Jira for estimation: Story Points and Story point estimate, case sensitive.

  • Story Points

    This is a legacy field, but you may work with Jira spaces (formerly "projects") that use it. By default it is available for Story and Epic issue types in company-managed spaces. You can edit your settings to make it available for all issue types, even in team-managed spaces.

  • Story point estimate Recommended

    This is a default field (locked) in Jira. You cannot delete this custom field. This is the default when you enable the Backlog and Estimation features in a team-managed space.

Make sure that your estimate field is on the edit screen for the issue types you are going to be refining. Jira uses screens to control which fields appear when creating, editing, or viewing an issue. A field can exist in your Jira instance but still not be editable if it isn't on the edit screen for that issue type.
  • Company-managed spaces: Ask a Jira admin to add your estimate field to the edit screen for the relevant issue types. See screen schemes for how screens are mapped to issue types.
  • Team-managed spaces: Check your issue type layout settings and make sure the estimate field is enabled.

App Home

The App Home is your personal dashboard in Groomba. To get there, click on Groomba in your Slack sidebar (under Apps) and select the Home tab.

From here you can:

  • Create new team — Start a new Groomba team
  • Groom Jira issues — Pick Jira issues to estimate with your team
  • View all teams — See all the teams in your organization
  • Help — Get a list of available commands
  • Guide — Open this guide
  • Contact — Send us feedback or report an issue

Below the buttons, you'll see your voting streak and any open polls from your teams — including each issue's details, a link to the poll in Slack, and whether you've voted yet.

Estimating

Estimating Jira issues

/groomba ISSUE-1 ISSUE-2

You can select any Jira issue to estimate, as long as you have access to that issue in Jira. The selected issues will start polling in your team channel with the settings configured in /groomba settings

You can also paste Jira URLs directly, e.g. /groomba https://yoursite.atlassian.net/browse/ISSUE-1. Groomba will extract the issue key from the URL automatically.

Note that you can use /groomba ISSUE-1 to bypass any backlog settings you set up in your team settings. This means, for example, you can poll Bug type issues even if you have Bug type issues explicitly disabled in your Backlog Settings.

Voting

Each team member is either a participant (can vote) or an observer (can see polls but cannot vote). You can change a member's status in your team settings.

  1. Each participant clicks a button to vote
  2. The message updates with who has already voted
  3. When every participant has voted (or the poll expires), the result is assigned in Jira

Possible poll results:

  • Estimate - An averaged point value is assigned in Jira.
  • Flag - Adds an impediment in Jira. The issue won't be auto-polled again until the flag is removed.
  • Defer - Pushes the issue to the back of your backlog queue.
  • Done / Resolve - Transitions the issue to "Done" in Jira.

Flag, Defer, and Resolve can each be enabled or disabled via Non-estimate voting options in polls in your team settings.

Re-estimating

After the poll has concluded, there are several options to follow up on the results.

  • Undo - Removes resolution and comments in Jira.
  • Re-estimate - Removes resolution and comments in Jira and creates a new poll for the same issue.

You can also poll for a Jira issue again by typing /groomba ISSUE-1 or pasting a Jira URL

Backlog & Auto-polling

Auto-polling from backlog

If your Jira backlog has unrefined issues, estimate polls for those issues will arrive as messages. Just click the buttons to vote.

The Maximum issues open from auto-polling backlog setting controls how many polls can be open at once. The default is Intelligent, which scales the number of open polls logarithmically based on the size of your backlog -- if you have 5 or fewer unrefined issues it opens all of them, otherwise it opens roughly 3 to 7 at a time. You can also set a fixed number (1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, or 99), or set it to 0 to turn off auto-polling entirely.

Backlog settings

/groomba settings

A backlog can be either a Jira project or a Jira filter. Selecting a filter lets you use any JQL query as your backlog — useful if you want to target a specific sprint, epic, or custom criteria. Backlogs are optional.

Groomba auto-polls unestimated issues in "To Do" status from your backlog. Use Skip automatic polling for selected issue types to exclude certain types (Epic is excluded by default).

Turning off auto-polling

/groomba settings

You can achieve this by first opening your team settings and then changing the selector for Maximum issues open from auto-polling backlog amount to zero.

Team Settings

Reminder settings

/groomba settings

Reminders are messages sent individually to users from the bot. In order to reduce the amount of notifications, we wait a certain amount of time to allow your team a chance to vote and to group polls together in a single message. Note that reminders will not be sent during your working hours configured in Scheduling Settings section.

Smart default reminders
  • First reminder 55 minutes after poll has started
  • Second reminder 1 hour before poll will expire

Averaging settings

/groomba settings

Configure how Groomba averages your team's votes.

  • Snap result to scale - Keep results on your pointing scale, or allow off-scale values.
  • Ceiling/floor/round - How fractional results are resolved.
  • Averaging method - Mean, median, geometric mean, or harmonic mean.
  • Rounding precision - Whole points, half points, or tenths (off-scale only).
  • Rounding cutoff - Custom threshold for rounding up, e.g. cutoff 0.2 means 4.2 rounds up to 5 (off-scale + round only).
  • Average on - Point values or scale index (on-scale only).

Use Test your configuration to preview results with example votes. The pre-rounded average is shown for comparison.

Scheduling settings

/groomba settings

When you create a team, Groomba picks smart defaults when your team will be polled, but scheduling settings allow you to customize this.

Smart default working hours
  • Days of the week: Mon-Fri
  • Times of day: 10AM - 6PM (10:00 - 18:00) in your timezone

Poll display settings

/groomba settings

Customize how estimation polls appear in your Slack channel. Access display settings from the team settings menu.

Display options
  • Issue descriptions - Show Jira issue descriptions inline
  • "Cast your vote" header - Show a header above the voting buttons
  • Running result - Preview the current result while polling is active
  • Vote results - Show individual vote values (who voted what)
  • Awaiting voters - Show which participants haven't voted yet

You can also choose whether vote buttons appear in a single row or split across multiple rows. A live preview updates as you change settings.

Administration

Updating the owner of a Groomba team

/groomba settings

Each team has a primary owner and optional secondary owners. The primary owner's Jira credentials are used for all API calls on that team.

  • Primary owner — Full control over the team. Can transfer ownership to another user.
  • Secondary owners — Can modify team settings but cannot transfer primary ownership.

If the primary owner leaves the Slack workspace, Groomba automatically transfers ownership to the best available team member. To manage ownership, open /groomba settings in the team channel and click Ownership settings.

Updating workspace admin

/groomba workspace

Workspace admins manage your organization's Groomba installation. There is one primary workspace admin (by default, whoever installed Groomba) and optional secondary workspace admins.

  • Primary admin — Can manage all teams and transfer the workspace admin role.
  • Secondary admins — Can see and manage all teams from the web portal and from /groomba workspace.

If the primary admin leaves the Slack workspace, Groomba automatically promotes a successor. To manage workspace settings, run /groomba workspace and click Workspace settings.

Using the web portal

/groomba portal

The web portal gives you a dashboard view of your Groomba teams outside of Slack. Type /groomba portal in Slack and click the link to open it.

From the portal you can:

  • See each team's name, channel, owner, Jira connection status, and team status
  • Open a team's Slack channel directly
  • Delete teams you own or manage

Workspace admins see all teams; regular users see only their own. Team settings are still managed in Slack via /groomba settings.

Managing Groomba usage

/groomba workspace
Your organization's teams

We are currently adding more ways to view and manage your teams, but right now the best solution is to run the command /groomba workspace

Deleting teams

/groomba settings inside a team channel

Pricing & Billing

Subscription

/groomba subscription

We deeply appreciate your support to keep the lights on and to keep offering innovative ways to save developer time.

Any member of your Slack workspace can run /groomba subscription to create or manage the subscription through the Stripe portal. We will also perform manual changes on your account if you contact us via /groomba feedback or emailing hello@groomba.ai

Pricing tiers

Free

Your first team is free with full functionality. Great for trying out Groomba with a single team.

Standard $4/mo per seat

For organizations using multiple teams. Billed based on the number of unique seats used during each billing period.

Enterprise

Custom pricing for large organizations. Contact us at hello@groomba.ai for details.

How seats are counted

Your seat count determines your bill. Here's how it works:

  • Who counts as a seat?

    A seat is any unique Slack user who is either a team participant or who voted in a poll during the billing period. The same person across multiple teams only counts as one seat. Team owners are not counted unless they are also a participant or have voted.

  • First team free

    Users who only belong to your smallest team (and no others) are not counted. This means your first team is effectively free.

  • Active team minimum

    Each active team beyond the first contributes at least 1 seat to the count, even if all its members already appear in other teams. This prevents abuse from creating many duplicate teams.

Example: Your workspace has Team A (Alice, Bob, Carol) and Team B (Bob, Dave). Bob is deduplicated, so you have 4 unique users. Team A is the smallest team whose unique-only members (Alice, Carol) are subtracted, giving you 2 billable seats (Bob + Dave).

Support

Submitting feedback

/groomba feedback

You can get in touch with us easily with /groomba feedback or by emailing hello@groomba.ai