Using miniscrum as an agile project management tool

Miniscrum does not impose on any particular workflow like many other “agile” project management tools do. With miniscrum you are free in way you do scrum in your team. So instead of description of what you have to do this page gives few hints that you can utilize to get all of the tool. Basic scrum knowledge is recommended.

Managing backlogs

This is pretty intuitive stuff and there is no reason to write about it much. Use buttons to create and delete items, double click to edit fields and drag'n'drop to set priorities. If you're in doubt, wait for a tooltip.

Dealing with estimations

There are two scales of estimations in miniscrum: story points and hours. Just like in “classical” scrum, you know. You may change estimations of your items at any time and as many times as you want.

However, hour estimations work best if you update them regulary. They are designed to reflect amount of work left for an item. For example, given a task you could have an estimation of 10h for it on Thuesday → 5h on Friday → 4h on Monday → 0h on Tuesday.

If you estimate like this you get actual charts and highlighting of completed items. A task is considered to be completed once it is estimated with 0 hours left. If all tasks of a story are completed the story itself is considered to be completed. It is OK if one of your subsequent estimations will be greater than current, it just means that you underestimated effort initially, fill free to raise estimation, burn-down chart will simply go up at this point. Updating estimations daily is an ideal but if forgot, well.. it is not a big deal.

Although hour estimations are designed to be burned down there is no reason to do the same with story points. It is better to keep them intact, so you can refer to them for comparison during next user stories estimation session.

Marking with flags

Flags is a very simple concept, they are also well known as tags and labels. Any item in miniscrum can be marked with any flag or combination of them. There is no single purpose for which flags were designed, you are free to use them for arbitrary purposes. Here's few ideas of what you can do:

• Create one flag for each team member, e.g. Jim, Paul, Mike and use them to assign tasks and stories to people
• Mark an item with a component flag, e.g. client, server, editors
• Mark bugs with bug flag
• Highlight tasks currently in progress with >>> flag or something like that

Just try and get know what makes sense for your team.

Later you may apply a filter to show only items related to the selected flag. Estimations are updated also to match filter criterion.

Viewing sprint statistics

Button opens sprint statistics window. You can set date range you are interested in using a form. After that you may mark selected date range as default, so you haven't to enter the same date range over and over again. It is convenient to have default range matching planned sprint's start and end dates. Once you have a default date range you will see ideal burndown line that helps a bit in sprint execution control.