Sunday, November 14, 2010

Choosing a Scrum tool for your distributed team: review of free Google Spreadsheet templates



Let me start by saying that I prefer whiteboards for co-located Scrum teams. A whiteboard way outperforms software tools as it enhances team collaboration (principle 1 of the Agile Manifesto remember).

However distributed teams need tools to run their Scrum project.

The Googe Apps platform is a great tool for distributed teams because it embeds realtime collaboration on documents, chat, blogs, wiki style intranets etc..

In this two series blog we will review two kind of tools: templates and Google Apps Marketplace tools. We will kick off with templates.

Templates

The template gallery from Google Docs contains all sorts of templates. It can be found on the Google Docs List page. Just enter "Scrum" in the search box and hit the "Search Templates" button. I narrowed it down to Google Spreadsheets and got 17 different templates.  I've compared the top 5 most used Scrum templates showing the Scrum artifacts (documents) they support.



Ranking
"Most users"
Google Docs Template Sprint backlog Sprint burndown Product backlog Product burndown
1 Simple SCRUM Agile Project Management
2 Sprint and Product backlog by Scrum Toolbox
3 Scrum Artifacts Story Points
4 Wicker Man
5 scrum - product backlog & sprint backlogs

As you can see these templates support basic Scrum. In my experience starting with a simple template is a good strategy for tool support. It forces you to get the job done with the bare minimum and be focused on delivering software. As the team advances throughout the sprints they can adapt these templates based on the their findings during the retrospectives.

Note: to try these templates out, you'll need a Google Account and activate Google Docs. More info on creating a Google account.

Conclusion

The big advantage of these templates is that they embed the collaborative features of the Google Apps platform. You can:

  • invite as many people as you want to work on the Scrum team, potentially from around the globe.
  • make copies for as much projects as you want, for free
  • integrate  with other Google apps products like Sites (for project spaces), calendar, YouTube, ...
  • further enhance them to your needs and wishes 
  • start using your Scrum tool in seconds,

One of the shortcomings is that these poorly scale beyond the project scope. If you have several teams in your company working with Scrum and delivering features from a shared product backlog, you would need to wire the product and sprint backlogs of these teams yourself.

Next time

In the second part of this series we will review Scrum tools from the Google Apps Marketplace. These compare to tools like Rally Software and Scrumworks.

Have an experience to share? Just comment, looking forward to hear from you.

Friday, November 5, 2010

Get to know your customers' priorities for your Scrum project using Google Apps

The product owner in Scrum ensures the ROI of the software. Getting the right priorities on what features to include in the next release is an important element in optimizing that ROI. Often the product owner will seek the help of customers & prospects in getting the priorities right. Google Apps offers some great "out of the box" tools to reach out to your customers. In this blog entry we will set up a simple system to get their priorities on features. If you're familiar with Google Docs and Sites it will take you 5 minutes. If not this is an opportunity to explore these tools.


Step 1: publish the list of potential features for your next release on a Google Site (see Google Help Creating a Site). For each feature, we add an image, a user story and some reference documentation. A Google site is like a Wiki so therefor you can add whatever information you want to explain your features to your customers.

Step 2: create a Google Form. With Google Docs, you can quickly create a form or survey, email it to your friends, family, or colleagues, and keep track of the answers in one spreadsheet (see Google Docs Help Creating a form). We create a simple form with just one question. The question is a grid in which the rows contain the features and the columns their desired priority. Click the image to have a closer look at the form.


We also added the link to the Google Site in the header section of the form. Customers can review the descriptions before voting on their priorities.

You can add an email notification that alerts you whenever someone votes.

Send the url of the live form to your customers and prospects and await their votes.

Step 3: reviewing the results of the voting is easy. Google integrated some greating looking graphics to review the responses. At a glance you can see what features your customers really want.




You can pick up the template for this form in the Google Docs template gallery.