Blog on Agile principles, practices, and project management tools
Meaningful Agile
Agile Estimation: Reference user stories
In the first part about agile estimation, we explained the fundamental principles of the estimation. Now it is time to think about how to implement them in real life. Reference stories For estimation, we will need to have 'the catalog of references' so we can compare all new requirements fast & accurately enough. In our first post, we did that with the first few buildings and then compared all [...]
Agile Estimation: Principles
Estimation has been questioned in software development for many years. How can an estimate be made accurately and quickly? And is estimation even necessary? Well, that is the question for thousands of bucks. Because estimation might be expensive. Especially in the age of changes. Time as an estimation unit is wrong! In our agile training, we asked trainees to visualize the number of outcomes they could finish per [...]
ScrumDesk 5.25.1: Archive old Releases
ScrumDesk is available for more than three years already and many customers finished dozens of releases and sprints. Now is the best time to forget them! With this version, you can archive release, its sprints, and backlog items so they are not loaded anymore in BACKLOG, PLAN or WORK views. This will significantly increase performance. Archived items are still available in REPORTS and DOCUMENTS so you can check what [...]
How to build product: Let’s start with the business
Agile development works very well in the product development area. But to build a successful product is much more work than just gather requirements and implement them. One of the trickiest things in agile development is how to prepare requirements that are ready for incremental development while still delivering some value for the customers. Businesses need to constantly deliver new functionality to survive. Customers want new functionality or [...]
Prioritization by Business value in Agile
The first blog post about prioritization was focused on MoSCoW - prioritization of the backlog from the perspective of customers. This is not enough for the products development of the commercial company. You need to survive, to pay bills, to pay the next sprints. You have to think about features from the perspective of the company as well. You should consider the business value in your Agile prioritization. Business [...]
How to prioritize in Agile I.: Customer’s perspective with MoSCoW
Prioritization is probably the most discussed part of development processes. Product backlogs are often quite complex with hundreds of requirements. How to find user stories in your story map which you should start developing first? Traditional approach The approach of traditional processes is simple. You have high, medium, low priorities. Ok, for some organizations it is still not enough so they have priorities on the scale of 0 [...]
How to work with Kanban board
Agile teams track their tasks on a Kanban board that visualize the status of work with help of multiple columns. Every column means some status. The team member should move task cards between these statuses to indicate on which task he works. Which tasks have been done and which still need to be developed. ScrumDesk enables such functionality even in the distributed or collocated teams. The design of [...]
ScrumDesk 5.23.2: Roadmap is coming!
What you see on the picture below is a new functionality of ProductDesk module with designer of roadmaps. We are preparing it for the next major release and it is going to be huge, very huge, very, very very huge. Popular sentence these days :) It is going to be available as a free upgrade for every customer who had bought ProductDesk. This is not just UX proposal, it is [...]
More than 4 users? Check your ScrumDesk account before March 5th!
The change of our pricing plan has been communicated in October the last year. ScrumDesk's pricing plan is now a combination of the monthly subscription fees for user licenses and one-time payment for selected modules. On March 5th we will start to issue monthly invoices for accounts with more than 4 free user licenses (commercial) or 20 licenses (non-profit). Please check your account settings before March 5th. Billing [...]
ScrumDesk 5.21.3: Move subtasks. Integrated payment
The latest version of ScrumDesk suite allows you to pay for user licenses and to buy additional packages directly from the application. VISA/MasterCard/Diners Club cards are accepted. Move subtask to other backlog items Until this version, it was possible to move subtask to other backlog item displayed on Kanban board in WORK view. Now you can move it to any other backlog item as well. Just click the subtask. Click [...]
ScrumDesk 5.21.1: Root Cause Analysis
RCADesk - new module for root cause analysis Are your development teams blocked by impediments? Are you sure you solve the right problems? Agile teams often hit a wall with problems they are not able to solve easily. More often they even try to solve just the first level of problems and not root causes. Process improvement is fundamental practice for ScrumMasters. No, Scrum mastership is not about appointments or [...]
ScrumDesk and Slack Integration
Create web hook in Slack Click Integration page in Slack.com team page. Add Incoming webhooks integration Choose channel where your messages from ScrumDesk should be kept. Configure this integration webhook icon, description and keep URL that is needed in ScrumDesk Configure Slack integration in ScrumDesk Click Project Setup gear icon in the left panel. Scroll down in PROJECT page to Integrations group. Paste Slack webhook URL that can be found [...]
ScrumDesk 4.20.3: Multilevel Requirements Hierarchy Backlogs
Multilevel of requirements was very often repeated request of our clients in the year 2016: to manage a portfolio of multiple small products in the same backlog, to manage non-development aspects of the product as well, to manage complex product with multiple modules, to manage activities and tasks for multiple clients. We have added multiple levels of requirements into the ProductDesk module in Story Map: Epic for top level requirements [...]
Buy ScrumDesk with user stories map, retrospectives or root cause analysis
Did Story Map and Retro menu items disappear from the left menu on ScrumDesk Start? Your 30 days trial period is over. ScrumDesk consists of multiple modules: ScrumDesk - the module for Scrum project management available for all customers for free. ProductDesk - commercial module ($99 one time payment per company) that helps product managers/owners to define the product, its vision, features, roadmap and map customers. The story map [...]
Change of ScrumDesk pricing
Looking back into history of ScrumDesk It is October 2013 7:00 PM. There it is. The first commit into our git with the newest web application we started to develop. From scratch. But it is not the first one. We even had two other working web applications which were unfortunately not designed as we envisioned for the best scrum project management tool for small and medium size agile teams. [...]