Scrum with Sunsama

At Sunsama, not only do we use scrum to implement our product, we use our product to implement scrum. Sunsama is the perfect tool for this job. In this post I am going to walk through how I use Sunsama to implement the scrum process at Sunsama.

Let’s start with a high-level review of what scrum is about: Scrum is a process software development teams use to build software. Some key features of this process include:

The team or a product owner maintains a prioritized backlog of product features to be delivered.
The team works in short iterations where the goal is always to deliver incremental product improvements.
The team has planning and retrospective meetings every iteration.
The team values visibility into who is doing what, and when

Of course, every team implements scrum differently. The flexibility of the process is another one of its key attributes.

Setup

To keep things organized I use a channel called ‘Scrum’.

Meetings

At Sunsama our sprints are 2 days each. Every week we plan on Monday, and deliver end of Tuesday. On Wednesday we plan again, and deliver again on Thursday. Friday we take a ‘process vacation’ and work on other things. (This is a really aggressive schedule. Most teams will use 1 or 2 week sprints.)

In order to plan these meetings in Sunsama, I created two recurring meetings:

Sprint Planning (Monday and Wednesday mornings)
Sprint Retrospective (Tuesday and Thursday afternoons)

These meetings are both added to the ‘Scrum’ channel I created earlier, and everyone on the team is invited. Here’s what this looks like in Sunsama:

Playbooks

Successful meetings always have an agenda, and scrum process meetings are no exception. Sunsama makes it super easy to add agenda items for recurring scrum meetings. This feature is called Playbooks. Here are the playbooks I created to drive scrum at Sunsama:

Playbooks need to be attached to events. In Sunsama, I opened the event from my calendar, and applied the playbook. Here’s what the event looks like with my playbook applied:

Now that events have a playbook I will not need to input agenda items again. As our process evolves and changes, we simply update the playbook, and the latest agenda always is always attached to meetings going forward.

Tasks

A key outcome of the sprint planning meeting is a list of tasks that should be completed in order to achieve the iteration goal. When using Sunsama, these tasks are entered in the Tasks page. Here’s my task panel after entering a few tasks during sprint planning:

As the team completes work, tasks should be marked complete using the check box. At the end of the day, any incomplete tasks are automatically rolled forward to the next day. When needed, you can assign task owners and due dates. Here is what my task panel might look like after a couple of days’ use:

As you can see, Sunsama keeps track of who worked on what, when, in real-time. Looking at the current day, it’s easy to see what tasks need to be done, and what’s been finished.

While working towards sprint goals, it is common for a team discover additional work that, while not strictly required for completion of the current sprint, should be worked on in the near future. Such tasks should be added to the backlog and reviewed during the next sprint planning meeting. Here is Sunsama with a few items in the backlog:

Conclusion

Sunsama is an ideal tool for managing scrum. Using Sunsama, I can schedule scrum process meetings, organize and run meetings using agendas, and track work using tasks.