Two days before Christmas we have published an update of ScrumDesk. We hope your teams will find it valuable once they will plan the first release of the year 2015.
The Goal
The main goal for release v.0.3 has been a supporter of all core Scrum practices used by agile teams.
From the improvement of planning, through daily life tracking to retrospectives.
Retrospective
The retrospective is the most valuable agile practice we think all teams (even non-agile) should practice. The best practice is, of course, to do the retrospective onsite with all team members participating. The best, but unfortunately not always possible. Especially for distributed teams.
For retrospectives ScrumDesk brings:
- one place for ideas that you will never lose,
- categorization of ideas with the support of different retrospective techniques (Mad-Sad-Glad, Good-To improve, etc.),
- voting for the most important ideas
- status of ideas implementation status tracking.
Reports
Users were asking for the commonplace to access project reports. Sprint burn-down chart has been accessible since the early beginnings of the ScrumDesk edition. Now all reports are integrated on Reports view which we plan to expand in upcoming versions.
Release BurnDown chart
In this version we also added a release burndown chart displaying:
- remaining work per every sprint of the release,
- prediction of release end based on minimum velocity,
- prediction of release end based on the Last 8 sprints velocity,
- prediction of release end based on maximum velocity.
Velocities help the team predict how many sprints will be necessary for the completion of release so they can adapt in case of scope changes.
Impediments tracking
Does something block the completion of your task? Do you need to indicate a problem or are your waiting? Just check the impediment flag in the Side view (red circle) and everybody can see how your reality is complex.
Tags
Is your backlog too complex and do you, the product owner, need to categorize user stories efficiently? Tags are very helpful in such situations. Tag editor is available in Side view for backlog items.
Colored task cards
It is quite challenging to keep visibility for complex boards with one hundred task cards.
Doing consultancy services for our customers we realized how important are colors even for task cards. Teams easily realize that testing can start or product owner needs to accept the story.
Minor changes
- An invitation to ScrumDesk can be sent from project setup directly without the need for Account administration.
- The organization can be renamed in Account settings now.
- Fixed sort of MoSCoW combo boxes.
- Detail of backlog item accessible from the Plan view.
- The task is assigned automatically once dragged from ToDo to the Done column.
- BurnDown chart updated immediately upon change of remaining time.
- Add task button has not been always available in the side view.
- The application version is displayed in the left menu.