bookmark_borderScrumboard: A Scrum project management tool for education

Most semesters, I teach a class in Software Engineering. The centerpiece of the course is a group project using Scrum, and the students absolutely require a good web tool to organize their work.

I have a number of requirements for a Scrum tool:

  • It has to be free;
  • It has to be easy to use;
  • It has to implement some basics of Scrum:
    • separate product and sprint backlogs,
    • orderable backlogs,
    • fixed-length sprints;
  • It has to be easy for me as an instructor to follow my students’ progress.

Moreover, I want whatever tool they use to implement the basics of Scrum and not much else; teams should be free to work how they like within the bounds of Scrum without the tool imposing its own viewpoint.

For a while I used one tool until it was no longer free; then I used another, but it didn’t really do what I wanted, etc.

Finally, I gave up and wrote my own, and the result is Scrumboard.

Working on the Product Backlog in Scrumboard

Scrumboard makes a few choices of how you might work within Scrum, such as Epics (which group Product Backlog Items), Acceptance Criteria (which define how to know when a story is implemented), and Tasks (which define how work is broken down within a sprint). All of these are optional, but I think they’re pretty lightweight solutions to common needs when working in Scrum.

The best way to get to know Scrumboard is to try it for yourself. Log in at https://www.learnscrum.xyz. There’s also a Github repository at https://github.com/rileypb/sb-angular.

A burndown graph from Scrumboard