Posted on 11, Jan 2011
Reaching wider community is for us absolutely welcome not just because of numbers (either count or price). For us the value is a knowledge how scrum adaptation is done.
It is very interesting to see how such simple project management framework is adapted in so many ways.
ScrumDesk development begun as materialized idea based on Scrum and XP from trenches book written by Henrik Kniberg.
The first year of ScrumDesk development we were (maybe) naive. We have decided to implement ”pure scrum” approach. Of course a reality, trainings, discussions and requests were the source of knowledge to improve tool. Improve it just slightly?
Story
I am sorry to repeat the concept of the story. Maybe it is more for beginners, but there are still a lot of them. And they are always welcome to learn how to improve.
Story in Scrum is short description of what is necessary to develop for who with why on mind. To provide the first template for it (definition by Mike Cohn):
As a [user role], I want [to have something] so that [the benefit].
Typical problem of new teams is how to write stories especially once the team will recognize feature, technical or spike stories. And teams solve this problem by special attribute (or tag). It is not just this attribute that is necessary to repeat.
Additional could be:
ScrumDesk simplifies story writing providing possibility to customize story templates.
Scrum Master is able to prepare stories templates that can be reused by the team to create a new story.
Templates are the way how to keep a backlog managed.
ScrumDesk provides possibility to define different templates according project.
To define templates Scrum Master should login to project. Tempaltes are defined on Project/Customization page.
New template can be added by click on New link.
ScrumDesk story template allows to define:
We decided to allow to define tasks as many teams defines the list of default tasks that every story must contains. This list is typically part of definition of done.
Team member can easy select the template from New menu item. Point a mouse pointer to small arrow and templates list will displays.
Now user should just click the template and new story will be created in the center of the board.
Story templates are helpful not just make stories definition more efficient, but they allows to keep backlog structured the same way even the team is large and distributed.