

Check out our startup: Scrumy - dkordik

http://scrumy.com<p>Scrumy is a simple tool for Scrum project management.<p>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.<p>We'd love some feedback from you guys, especially if you're familiar with Scrum.<p>You can check out the Pro features at the "demo" project,  http://scrumy.com/demo<p>Thanks!
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jrockway
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.)

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gruseom
_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)

~~~
jrockway
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.

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Hates_
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!

~~~
dkordik
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.

~~~
Hates_
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.

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13ren
<http://scrumy.com>

<http://scrumy.com/demo>

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

Great work, very simple and it works!

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patrickg-zill
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" .

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

10/10

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jfew
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.

~~~
dkordik
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.

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chris123
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?

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ralph
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.

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

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bigbang
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.

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jhickner
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.

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dkordik
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.

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kajecounterhack
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?

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

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

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

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

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

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r7000
So simple and elegant. That was fun! Great work guys.

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sktrdie
i dont like the flash title :(

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observer
sleek!

