BASIC OPERATION OF THE ONLINE SCRUMBOARD

You can create a new scrumboard with a quick initialization process. After completing the process, you receive a unique web address pointing to your scrumboard. Navigating your web browser to this address displays your virtual scrumboard, which is initially empty (click on any image in this page to see a larger version in a new window):

A single virtual scrumboard should be used for tracking a single sprint in the SCRUM process. A new scrumboard should be created for subsequent sprints.

The virtual scrumboard is organized into four columns. The "story" column contains user stories, which in SCRUM represent major deliverables. The "not started", "in progress", and "done" columns contain detailed work items related to a particular user story. Selection of user stories for a sprint and their decomposition into detailed work items happens during a SCRUM sprint planning. During the planning meeting the scrumboard is populated with notes representing both user stories and associated work items. New notes are created by dragging the notes from yellow, red, blue, or green note "stacks" on the left side of the board onto the board. At the end of a sprint planning meeting the scrumboard may look like this:

The location of notes on the scrumboard implies their status. A note placed in the "story" column represents a user story. A note placed in the "not started" column represents a detailed work item that has not been started yet, etc. Status of a particular work item is changed by dragging the note from one column to another. Text of a note or associated work estimates can be also updated at any time. Typically, the board is updated by all team members during a daily SCRUM meeting. However, team members may choose to update the board at any time. Below is an example of a task board in the middle of the sprint:

At the end of the sprint, all work items would have been ideally moved to the "done" column. In practice, there is usually some remaining work in progress.

One of the fundamental principles of SCRUM is the emphasis on team collaboration. Online scrumboard application at TangyOrange simplifies daily SCRUM meetings of distributed teams by supporting concurrent access to the scrumboard by multiple users.

Team members working with the online scrumboard at the same time can see their changes in real time without refreshing the browser window. This facilitates communication during daily meetings of distributed teams and preserves some of the dynamic achieved when the team is collocated.

While location of notes in specific columns of the scrumboard represents their status, tracking granularity can be improved with work estimates.

Create online scrumboard

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