Plan and Estimate Your Project

• Create Stories and rate their relative complexity. We often use a text editor in our planning meetings and then import those stories using our import feature.

  

• Ask your Product Owner to prioritize the stories via drag and drop.

  

• Input your team's known velocity, or guess by changing velocity to fit the number of stories you think your team can complete in one sprint.

  

• Look at the final Sprint to see the estimated project completion date.

  

• Changing the velocity and/or story complexities will dynamically reëstimate delivery dates. We often use two different velocities in order to give product owners a range of estimated costs.

Track Your Project

• Breaking down a story into tasks is valuable discovery process.

  

• Drag a task to Started when you begin, and Complete when you're finished.
  Your initials will indicate that you have claimed that task.

  

• New tasks default to an estimate of 1 hour. A red box appears at midnight each day, indicating an estimate is due.
  Stories cannot be started until they have a current estimate.

  

• Estimates are used to plot the Burndown chart.

  

• The Backlog and Burndown chart help the Scrum Master keep their finger on the pulse of the project.

  

Deliver Results

• Click on Deliver when the story has been deployed, and is ready for the Product Owner to try out.



• The Product Owner receives an email notification, test drives the new feature, and logs in to accept or reject the story.



• If Product Owner rejects the story, the team members working on the story will be notified instantly by email.

API

A Task API is available to users with registered accounts, which enables one to update task status via post-commit hooks, etc.

Fetching the status of a task:

curl -u login@example.com:password http://scrumninja.com/tasks/109/status.xml

Updating the status of a task:

curl -u login@example.com:password -H "Content-Type: text/xml"

-d '<status>done</status>' http://scrumninja.com/tasks/109/status.xml

Philosophy

Since product owners and team members have different priorities, they need different views into the project.

That's why ScrumNinja has two primary views:

• Backlog View - Keep product owners focused on prioritizing and accepting high level user stories They can monitor progress, receive notifications when stories are delivered, give feedback on deliverables, and see when things will get done.


• Card Wall View - Keep team members focused on what is pertinent to them: tasks. It's also essential to the Scrum Master for the daily standup meeting.

We've used several online project management tools, and nothing has been quite as good as our physical index card wall. Some of the other tools we found had either too little or too many features, while others were ill-suited to our Scrum-specific needs. We also wanted something that would work for distributed teams, plot burndown charts automatically, and that could store history.

David and Rodney are Certified Scrum Masters and co-founders of Internaut, an Agile Ruby on Rails consultancy.

Welcome to ScrumNinja and Happy Scrumming!