Technology has made our lives easier. The number of tools and devices we have at our disposal has made our lives more productive and our work more efficient. The Agile software development methodology has been adopted by several organizations to improve their adaptability, responsiveness, and productivity.
How can we improve the way we incorporate Agile Scrum into our projects? Scrum tools can be the answer. Just like the other gadgets in our lives, Scrum software and tools help improve the productivity of our teams, keep stakeholders happy and help us deliver better products.
Before we jump into the use and needs of Scrum software and tools let us understand more about Scrum roles and how they work.
Three essential roles for Scrum success
The Scrum Guide defines three pillars of a Scrum team, which include:
The Scrum Master
The Product Owner
The Development Team
The Scrum team is a small unit which is self-organised and works towards achieving the same goal; that is, the development and deployment of the product and customer satisfaction.
The Scrum Product Owner
The Scrum Product Owner is among the most essential roles in the Scrum team and acts as a bridge between the stakeholders and the development team. More involved with the business side of the software development process, the PO represents the customer and can be considered as their proxy. The Product Owner defines the product vision, and, along with the Scrum Master and the development team works towards delivering a product that matches stakeholder needs.
The Scrum Master
The Scrum Master is the servant leader whose main responsibility is to ensure that the Scrum team can perform to the best of its abilities. They do this by overseeing the day-to-day activities of the Scrum team and removing any impediments that may hinder the productivity of the development team. The Scrum Master facilitates stakeholder collaboration along with the product owner and ensures that teams can handle complex environments and deliver projects successfully.
The Scrum development team
The development team generally consists of three to nine people, according to the Scrum Guide. These would include developers, testers, designers and more. The team is allowed to take decisions and decide the length of the sprint and how they will go about it. The development team collaborates to create a high-quality product increment at the end of each sprint that is as per the expectations of the stakeholders.
Scrum ceremonies or events
Scrum has five formal events as defined by the Scrum Guide. These events help to validate the Scrum artifacts and implementing them helps enhance transparency. The events are also called ceremonies and are:
- Sprint Planning
- Daily Scrum
- Sprint Review
- Sprint Retrospective
- The Sprint
What Does A Scrum Tool Do?
What would you need a good Scrum tool to do? Make your life easier by making processes more efficient and less cumbersome, help you deliver quality products without making a huge dent on your budget, right?
With Scrum topping the popularity charts for Agile project management methodologies, the need for efficient Scrum tools has risen. There are plenty of Scrum tools available that fit the bill and provide interfaces that help teams seamlessly follow Scrum processes and reap its benefits. These tools help:
- Increase productivity
- In task management, daily scrum management
- Increase team collaboration
- In progress tracking and risk management
Scrum Software for the Ultimate Project
There are several Scrum software tools that aid in project development using Scrum; not just in technical environments, but in non-technical sectors as well. Software like JIRA, Infinity, TargetProcess, QuickScrum, Wrike etc provide:
- User friendly GUI
- Competitive pricing
- Product backlog management
- Time tracking and calendar tools for scheduling
- Scrum metrics and charts
- Sprint planning tools
- Third party tools for integration
- User story mapping
- Burnup and Burndown charts
and many more features that will help Agile teams serve their customers better, improve return on investment, reduce costs, enhance collaboration and ensure stakeholder satisfaction. These tools help team uphold the values of Agile and make implementing the Scrum framework easier.
Best Scrum Tools
Here are some of the best Scrum tools available in the market:
1. JIRA
Jira is a popular tool used by large organizations to manage their Scrum projects. It has numerous features including customizable scrum boards, reporting features and more. Here’s how teams benefit from this tool
- Customizable Scrum and Kanban boards
- Roadmaps to communicate with team and with stakeholders
- Access to tools for Agile reporting
- View of code and deployment status
- End to end DevOps visibility
- Easy scalability
- Secure deployment
- Developer tool integration
- Rich APIs to automate processes
2. TargetProcess
This tool has been especially designed for teams that want to scale agile. It offers a number of customizable features that make it easy to work with scrum and agile.
Here’s how teams benefit from this tool(Source: Targetprocess Agile Portfolio and Work Management Tool)
- Ideation
- Built in reports to analyse data and uncover trends
- Gather ideas across sources
- Cloud hosting and on-premise hosting
- Enterprise grade security
- Collaborate across the enterprise
- Collaborate with DevOps tools including GitLab, Azure DevOps, GitHub etc
3. VivifyScrum
This tool is marketed as an all-in-one solution to manage projects, collaborate and track. Here’s how teams benefit from this tool (Source: Agile Project Management Software - VivifyScrum)
- Tools to manage agile projects—organize, manage, track and deliver
- Collaboration boards to effectively collaborate with team and stakeholders
- Create invoices to track and manage business and clients
- Manage teams and track tasks
4. Infinity
This tool is among the most popular in Agile and Scrum organizations due to the many customizations and features it provides. Its various tools help reduce time to market, ensure better quality, improve collaboration and enable customer satisfaction.
Here’s how teams benefit from this tool Source: Infinity | Customizable Work Management Platform (startinfinity.com)
How Can Scrum Apps Benefit Your Team?
The number of Scrum apps and software available in the market for Scrum projects is mind boggling. Which one you choose depends on the requirements of your team and project, and each comes with its own benefits. Some of these benefits include:
- They help teams, organizations and the product being created
- They ensure better quality by providing the right framework, support mechanism and the right processes
- Allow for continual improvement by putting in place a feedback loop and sprint reviews by stakeholders
- Help solve impediments and daily issues by incorporating daily testing and product owner feedback into the development process
- Ensure upfront documentation and help prioritise high value items in the product backlog, thus decreasing time to market.
- Quick feedback also helps improve the product and thus helps in continuous improvement.
The faster marketing of products increases return on investment, helps tap the market demand and ensures long term benefits for the customer and thus earns their trust for the organization
The primary tenet of Agile is team collaboration. Scrum software tools help in high level collaboration between the Scrum Master, Product Owner and the development team. Teams can organise, review, plan and discuss everyday tasks, meetings, impediments and more.
How to Pick the Best Tool for Your Team?
With so many options available, choosing the right Scrum tool for your team can be a tricky task. What you need to do is go through the features of the best tools and see which one best fits your requirements. While the number of features you get will be directly proportional to the money you are ready to pay for the tool, there are some basic requirements your tool must satisfy.
Backlog creation:
The very basic format of a Scrum project lies in the creation of a product backlog which sets the pace for the entire project. The backlog is primarily created by the Product Owner with assistance from the Scrum Master and the development team. The tool you choose should help you create the product backlog so that you can prioritise items, define the sprints and identify sprint goals.
Implement feedback:
Scrum projects are based on the Agile values of continuous feedback. Your scrum tool should have features which will make your customer’s feedback and requirements easily accessible to you. This will help you implement these changes at the earliest. This continuous feedback loop will help keep customers happy.
Sprint creation:
Scrum is iterative and adaptive and works by breaking down projects into small sized sprints. Your tool must aid you in the creation of sprints and burndown charts. These help you keep track of your progress on the project and are essential components of a Scrum project.
The other things your tool should be able to do include:
- Plan and track
- Customise process templates
- Customise dashboards and reports
- Help in time management
- Help create epics and stories
- Provide collab and reporting tools
- Provide review tools
And just like you will create a product that is user friendly, the tool you use also needs to be user friendly for the team. If your team is happy using it, and it makes your life easier and your projects better, then you have the right tool!
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