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Check out our startup: Scrumy
27 points by dkordik on Sept 5, 2008 | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments
http://scrumy.com

Scrumy is a simple tool for Scrum project management.

My partner in crime and I began working on Scrumy (our then side-project) full-time shortly after flying back from the final interviews for YC Summer '08 empty handed.

We'd love some feedback from you guys, especially if you're familiar with Scrum.

You can check out the Pro features at the "demo" project, http://scrumy.com/demo

Thanks!




This is a good startup idea. I used to work at a company that heavily misapplied Scrum[1], and they bent over backwards to spend as much money as possible on anything that said "Scrum" on it. Software, consultants, everything. Basically, this should be easy money for you :) The people doing Scrum right will also be happy to pay for software that makes it easier.

[1] (I loved the misapplication of Scrum. The Scrum book we were using had examples of things to never do, and that's exactly what we did. We actually had 8-hour sprint planning meetings every two weeks, in addition to an 8-hour "demo days" and "retrospectives"... leaving 7 days out of every 10 for actual work. Of course, those were cut into by other meetings like "architecture working sessions" and so on. In the end, nobody got anything done, so they added even more meetings to determine why that was the case. Around that point, I quit.)


I loved the misapplication of Scrum

I heard Ken Schwaber tell a funny story about this. He was asked in by some place to evaluate how they were doing, so he attended their daily scrum. For anyone who doesn't know, that's supposed to be a brief meeting in which a facilitator called the scrum master asks each team member: 1. What have you done since yesterday? 2. What are you doing today? 3. Are you experiencing any impediments to your work? (The intention, of course, is that the scrum master then fight like hell to clear the impediments.)

At this outfit, they had taken a project manager and labeled him "scrum master". His version of the three questions:

1. Have you done what I told you to do yesterday?

2. Here's what I want you to do today.

3. (omitted)


He visited our company also, before I worked there. He suggested we get some white boards so we could collaborate with each other.

That suggestion was nixed by the "office manager" (secretary), because white boards didn't go with the office's decor.

I am not making this up. I'm surprised I lasted for half a year at that company.


Wow! This is unbelievably impressive. In terms of Scrum, can I assign points to my stories? and see an overview of my total points for a specific sprint?

Overall though, it really rocks. I will be using it for sure come Monday morning!


There is currently no built-in mechanism to manage points. We've seen some people put point values in the task text. In this version, we're trying to keep things really simple.


After having a play I think the idea of placing points in the task text works well. I can also tally up all the points and place them in the sprint name, which can then also be renamed at the end of a sprint to show how many points were estimated against how many were actually completed.


http://scrumy.com

http://scrumy.com/demo


I absolutely love the promotional video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DmZ5O5AJ2F4

Great work, very simple and it works!


Did you check whether scrum-y.com was taken?

Maybe I just have a weird set of brain cells connected to my optic nerve, but I read that URL as being pronounced as "screw me dot com" .


VERY well done and polished. I really like the draggable ordering of tasks, simple interface, easy to manage at-a-glance.

10/10


Where's the burndown chart (or any task effort estimates at all)? Where do I maintain my product backlog? This tool feels more suited to something like XP or generic Agile than pure Scrum to me.

But that's the problem with project management tools: everyone's got a different mental model for organizing work and measuring output because nobody strictly follows all the practices of any one methodology to the letter ("Agile is empirical," after all). You adopt the practices that work for you and your team, which means you have to create your own project management tools adapted to that unique workflow (unless you're lucky enough to find the tools that someone else created meet your needs perfectly).

Otherwise, you're forced to adapt your workflow to the tools you choose.


We've played with the idea of having a burndown chart and other task point-tracking-related things. They might show up as a future Pro feature, or they may show up in the next level of Scrumy.


Hi jfew-

Just wanted to let you know that the current version of Scrumy Pro has both a product backlog and burndown charts.


Neat! Would be even neater if free for 1-user.

I did a quick search on Google for "scrum boards" and "virtual scrum boards" and found some similar, but maybe overly complicated and expensive, apps. Also found this http://code.google.com/p/scrumboard/. Anyone try any of these?


The 121 seconds of my time would have been better spent showing me it in action instead of trying to instill that there's only one M in scrumy.com. I know that now, but I don't need to know it since I'm not planning on spending more time investigating it. I think that's a shame for the both of us.


We did that video for fun really, eventually we want to have a screencast of how to use


It looked like a calender at first sight, but great job. Its simple to look at all info on one page to see which is to be done, verified etc. MAybe little bit more color differences would help. Like verification like in red or something, since somebody mostly would be waiting on it.


Amazing! I love the design and the sheer amount of info conveyed in a small space.

One bug in chrome (who cares yet, right?) but anyway: When typing into the task textbox, the centered text doesn't display correctly.


We noticed that. Really, really weird bug! I don't know why that is happening yet or we would have fixed it, sorry. Which is a shame, because otherwise Scrumy screams with Chrome's new JS engine.


Seen mingle? (from thoughtworks http://studios.thoughtworks.com/mingle-project-intelligence )


Scrumy is cheaper, and thanks to dkordik, looks much better too :)


I spent 10 minutes sitting there generating names.

bucksaws12anthrax highland56horsiest imparts21biscuits sourly95whole cling33wombats

I got such a kick out of this, thanks! How do you generate these names?


With a very carefully pruned dictionary. Glad you dig it!


This is pretty cool. I like the dashboard vs. the basic one. I can use this.


I'm sorry, I don't get it. What's a story and what is scrum?


So simple and elegant. That was fun! Great work guys.


i dont like the flash title :(


sleek!




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