The Ultimate Scrum Planning Board

January 19, 2010 by Hamid Shojaee

What if you could have a planning board that looked as beautiful as the one below? What if it allowed you to look at your product backlog by item type (defect, feature, tasks or even help desk incidents)? What if it let you look at them by product, version or sprint? What if it let you apply any of your private or public filters? What if it let you group your results by project, assignee, priority, severity or any number of other fields (including custom fields)? What if you could have a color-coded strip along the top of each card that visually told you the priority or the status?

What if you had all of that and more and you could drag-and-drop the cards to change the workflow step of an item or the assignee or the priority?

What if you didn’t have to ask any more what ifs? ALL of that is coming in OnTime V10. Here is a sneak peek screenshot:

OnTime 2010 WEB Planning Board

Oh wait, but what if you could have it as both a web application and as a Windows WPF application:

OnTime 2010 WINDOWS Planning Board

Are you excited yet?

You will be! OnTime V10 Beta will be out in February. All customers will have access to the beta when its released. Be sure to purchase OnTime now prior to the price increase at the end of March. More Info >

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Categorised as: Development

http://www.armondmehrabian.com @armond_m

Hamid,

Very nice.

Will this tool also support work in progress limits for each step in the work flow as prescribed by the Kanban methodology?

-Armond
Portofino Solutions, Inc.
San Diego, CA
- http://www.axosoft.com Hamid Shojaee
  
  Thanks Armond. No there is currently no plans to have work in progress limits. It has never come up as a request.
  - Derek
    
    Hi Hamid,
    
    This looks great. It’s a Heijunka Board!
    
    I requested something like work in process limits just recently. Feature 5365. This was just before I started learning about Scrum-ban. To paraphrase myself “I beleive that this feature would benefit from some sort of capacity planning as well.” I feel this is a really good additional component to a Kanban based Scrum model.
    
    Thanks!!
http://news24.com Tim Gregory

Hi Hamid

This scrum tools looks great and I’ll be sure to try it when I can get access to it, but you may be neglecting some important elements of scrum.

We use scrum extensively at 24.com, and have been for a few years. We have looked at online tools for managing our scrum boards, but have have continued to stick with physical boards covered in paper for a couple of important reasons.
1. Physical collocation and getting developers to talk to each other are powerful features of scrum.
It’s certainly possible to have distributed scrums, but we’ve found that co-location is so important that we will frequently get developers to swap desks so that they are a few meters closer to the people they need to work with most frequently.
We’ve found that the productivity increase we get from co-locating people within earshot of each other is really important. Using online tools can help you manage distributed teams, but it breaks down the importance of the board as a point of focus.
2. Information radiator – we value a great big physical board showing a burn-down chart and tasks marching across it. We could simulate this with a big plasma screen or a projector, but the cheap and effective way is to continue using boards.
3. Getting developers to stand up each day in front of the board, speak to the team, and physically move tasks is really important. It’s part of the subtle team dynamics that make scrum work. We don’t get that if tasks are moving on a virtual board controlled from the devs desktop.

So while I’m not knocking your product and I look forward to trying it out, don’t get trapped in the idea that physical boards are obviously inferior to online boards.
- http://www.axosoft.com Hamid Shojaee
  
  I couldn’t agree more that physically locating developers close to one-another has a huge effect on improving productivity. Everything else is supplementary and adds small incremental improvements.
David

Show us more of V 10 .
Farshid

A very new nice feature would be importing/exporting tasks from/to Microsoft project.
http://TrinityInspection.com David

Ditto on the import/export to Project. Or at least Gantt Chart support/export.
http://www.isaac.ca jsb

Would like to see more of V10. Would like to see the option to import contacts from Outlook public folders!!! This is a MAJOR feature for the helpdesk and incident tracking!
Callon

You mentioned upcoming integration support for Subversion, etc. Will you be providing integration to TFS?

If not…I’d like to request this.

Thanks
Callon
http://www.ryantechinc.com Kevin McMillen

Just another breakthrough idea! Nice work guys… we are finishing our integration to TFS using your SDK so this will really help us out a lot.
http://www.MarketingAdvocate.com Mike Guerrieri

Hi Hamid,

This looks great!

Can you tell me what the field is that is being used to represent the columns in this display… i.e. Workflow Step or Status?

We currently use the Workflow Step for our ‘queues’. For example Requested, Requirements, Estimate, and Sprint Planning are some of our queues. If Workflow Steps could be used to represent these columns, this would be great for the way that we use OnTime.

Thanks,

Mike
- http://www.axosoft.com Hamid Shojaee
  
  Mike, yes, the planning board does use workflow steps to represent the columns.
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Doctorbombay

Hamid,
The scrum planning board screenshot looks great, nice to have web based support for it as that seems to be the desired way to go. Seems like you guys are finally catching up to Greenhopper.
However, I still dont see scrum supported in V10, it seems to have the same issues as the previous versions. There doesnt seem to be any concept of Stories and related tasks and rollups of status. Rally seems to have a cleaner implementation where if all the tasks for a story are completed, the Story itself is completed. Plus we dont assign hours at the Story/Feature level, only at the task level and that seems to be a problem too.
Hopefully you will have this in your next version.
- http://www.edgeproducts.com Gerrit
  
  We are working on a small scheduled app that queries the DB and updates all Features time remaining with the sum of the time remaining of all Tasks that have an “implements” relationship to the Feature. There are a few issues we have ran into with burndown charts for the Features but otherwise it seems to be working quite well.
- http://www.axosoft.com Hamid Shojaee
  
  Hi Doctor Bombay! OnTime has full support for Scrum. Take a look here: http://www.axosoft.com/ontime/scrum
  
  OnTime also has support for User Stories and estimation using hours or points. It’s up to the admin how they setup their database.
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The Ultimate Scrum Planning Board

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