We are trying to implement SCRUM with the Microsoft SharePoint Online. Although we can use tasks and issue tracker to suit SPRINTS and iterations and system testing, we are using an excel speadsheet to produce the burndown chart. However, we have to extract all the tasks first, reformat the data, the feed in the chart values. Does anyone have a quicker way?
Thanks, Tony. www.webcloudsolutions.net
G'day,
I can't really comment on the SharePoint aspects as I'm a *nix guy. I thought I'd mention that you should be referring to it as Scrum. It's not an acronym but taken from a word that refers to a part of the game of rugby where everyone binds together and each team member has a particular job to do. So the convention is to refer to it as Scrum.
There are lots of excellent, free tools out there to assist with sorting out your burndown charts rather than just chewing raw Excel data.
BTW Good luck with the SharePoint bits. (-:
Edit: Actually, while looking for a couple of tools I stumbled across the 21 Apps site which specialises in Agile SharePoint solutions. Some interesting looking stuff there.
We use SharePoint custom lists to help us implement scrum. It's far from perfect, but allows for a lot of flexibility.
What we do is extend the tasks list to include a sprint number (really a lookup to another list), product backlog (another lookup), estimated effort, and estimated time to complete columns (ETC-01 through ETC-10 - we do one or two week sprints). We also have a field to flag whether the row is capacity data or not (one of these rows per sprint per person).
Then we have several views, but one primary view which shows a grouping by "is capacity data" followed by "assigned to". We also total those ETC values. So our summary view can give us a quick look at the total for the team for both capacity and estimated time to complete for any day in the sprint. We currently manually put this in Excel, but have considered automation as well. We have another view that is a datasheet view used for data entry. Almost all of our views have a master-child page where you choose the sprint master to view the sprint backlog details.
So, all of that sounds rough, but it's pretty easy to use once you get the hang of it.
The benefit is that we have a lot of flexibility when we need it. For example, our Product Backlog list may have custom columns depending on the project.
We have used 3rd party tools before, but for us it gets a little difficult because we are a consulting company and our clients interact with these tools as well.
If you are not constrained by Sharepoint, there are plenty of free and locally installable tools that would simplify your life a great deal.
Example: http://github.com/friflaj/ajellito
Apologies for the blatent plug - we found the same problem with not having a great user experience of doing Scrum in SharePoint - lists are good but nothing really gave the easy to use as a whiteboard experience.
I have used other tools like VersionOne - but really find that add to many features and just get over complicated for most teams to get into.
We create a Scrum for SharePoint solution: 21Scrum
Note: This is only availble for SharePoint 2010 as we have built it to work in the Sandbox for easy deployment.
Andrew