USEFUL CONVENTIONS

Web scrumboard application at TangyOrange may be customized in many ways. While SCRUM prescribes a general process framework, it leaves process details to be adjusted to the particular circumstances of the team and project. This article describes some of the conventions for using the online scrumboard application which may help accommodate your specific application of SCRUM.

Notes of different color can be used to categorize work items in a way that is meaningful to your application of SCRUM. For example, yellow notes can represent work items identified during the sprint planning meeting, while red notes may represent work items that were discovered during the sprint. Or, different colors may be used to represent work items related to a particular discipline (e.g. development, design, architecture, testing) in software development:

Using different colors provides immediate visual clue about the nature of the work directly on the scrumboard. While the web scrumboard application does not associate any meaning with a particular color, it allows notes to be filtered and sorted using their color as a criteria when the scrumboard is exported to CSV and processed in your spreadsheet application:

Breaking the text of a scrumboard note into multiple lines (by pressing Enter/Return key) can be used to store different classes of information about the work item on separate lines. For example, this mechanism could be used to track work item assignment to team members:

When the scrumboard data is exported to the CSV format, individual lines of text from the notes are exported into separate spreadsheet columns. This enables data to be sorted and filtered using your spreadsheet application functionality. For example, you could quickly filter work items owned by a particular team member:

Using bone yard area is a convenient mechanism to store arbitrary notes or ideas that come up during the use of the scrumboard application. It may be used as a holding area for new items to be added to the SCRUM product backlog for subsequent sprints, or work items postponed from the current sprint. Notes in the bone yard area, even if they have work estimates associated with them, are not counted toward the work estimate totals of the current sprint when the burndown chart is generated.

As you probably expect by now, notes from the bone yard area can be quickly filtered when the scrumboard data is exported to the CSV format and processed in your spreadsheet application.

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