You are here

Resources/Downloads

Why waste time building things from scratch, here are a few resources to help make your life a little easier. Most of these can be printed and laminated as a card for use as quick reminders, or to regularly remind the team what we are trying to do and how to do it.

Free Web based Scrum Tool
A free Scrum tool. This web based tool is aimed at new teams finding their scrum feet. Teams that don't need the distraction of having to learn how to use overcomplicated cumbersome expensive tools but at the same time need to use and manage epic pieces of work

Excel based Scrum tool
Another free Scrum tool. Use this to print cards from the web based tool, or use it standalone to run your smaller projects.
You will find more Excel based tools Here (external link)

Story Kick-off
A standard set things to validate before starting work on a story,

Backlog and Story guidelines
A quick reference guide on how to invest in your user stories.

Daily Scrum or Stand-up agenda
A reminder on what the daily scrum is for. What to include and what should be taken offline.

Sprint or Iteration Review Agenda
Make your sprint reviews consistent, productive and valuable.

Sprint Retrospective Agenda
The meeting you really do not want to skip.

'A sample Burn-down & burn-up (openoffice compatible)'
Burn-up in points is easy and normally best updated by hand on a large sheet next to the board. Where this is not possibly or feasible (offshore teams etc.) a shared spreadsheet, google.doc etc makes sense. The file 'A sample Burn-down & burn-up (openoffice compatible)' below includes a template with instructions on how to do this painlessly.
The more difficult one is burn-down of hours left on stories in the iteration. These are a number of methods used to calculate this. these range from the sublime to the ridiculous. The approach taken here is to base the available hours on an ideal day multiplied by team availability. This way you can easily cater for part time team members as well as scheduled and unscheduled absence. It also gives an indication of the work left, the work in progress and the ideal burn-down. I have tweaked the availability for the first and last days of the iteration to cater for initial sprint planning as well as sprint review and retrospective, but you are obviously free to amend as you feel the need.
TIP: When printing these, do not print both graphs on a single sheet, print each graph separately on at least an a4 sized page.