Happy Halloween!  After a full night of Trick-or-Treating with our kids, I thought I'd share a grab bag of Scrum tools with my fellow Scrummers.  I've said it before, I'm not a huge fan of tools, but sometimes they can be helpful.  Scrum tools run the gamut, from simple index cards to full blown enterprise management solutions.  Here's a list of Scrum tools our team has used, from basic to elegant.  We have found success with all of them.  We've outgrown some, but I think they are all useful and effective in one way or another.

Backlog Index Cards: You can use simple index cards and a small box to write your user stories on. Use 3X5 cards to keep your user stories short and to the point.  Store them in a simple index card box, arranged by priority.  During your sprint planning sessions, re-prioritize your cards if you need to. Move the cards you select for your sprint backlog into a sprint box (or better yet a task board).  Voila, instant backlog management tool...cost, about $3.29 for 500 user stories!!!

Sprint Task Boards: Create a simple board to post your sprint backlog cards on (we made ours out of cork).  Divide the board into five columns: User Story, To Do, In Progress, To Verify, and Complete.  Create a set of task index cards that describe the sprint backlog tasks associated with each user story you selected for the current sprint.  Put these in the To Do column next to their associated user story.  As you progress through your Sprint backlog items, move the task index cards along the columns until you are done with all your sprint tasks.  It's a very visual way to keep track of your team's Sprint progress. Check out Mike Cohn's page on Task Boards for several examples of different task board variations. 

Planning Poker Cards: Planning poker is a method of team-based, collaborative estimating. In planning poker, each team member uses a deck of numbered cards to assign story points to each user story in the backlog.  For a detailed description of planning poker, check out PlanningPoker.com .  When our team first started playing planning poker, we used simple index cards with large hand-written numbers on them.  We now use a deck of professionally made cards that we received when we attended Mike Cohn's Agile Estimating and Planning class.  You can purchase your own planning poker decks from Crisp.  If you're not estimating with planning poker, you owe it to yourself to try it.  Plus, it's fun.  My favorite card: infinity (yes, I'm a consultant).

Scrum Backlog Spreadsheets: When we first started out, we used a simple spreadsheet template we found online to manage our product backlogs, and our sprint backlogs.  The more we used Scrum, the more the spreadsheet grew in complexity to include time tracking by team member & task, sprint dashboard reports, risk logs, impediment logs, and sprint retrospective notes.  As our projects became more complex, we needed to manage multiple release plans, multiple projects and multiple dispersed team members.  We tried using Microsoft SharePoint to manage our spreadsheets in a distributed environment, but it too became unmanageable. Quite simply, we reached the limit of what the spreadsheets were able to do for us.  Our scrummasters were spending far too much managing the spreadsheets.  But, for smaller projects, spreadsheets should work just fine.  Your can download our last incarnation of our Scrum spreadsheet here. 

Enterprise Scrum Software: As our spreadsheets became too unruly to manage, we evaluated several COTS products to help manage our large enterprise Scrum projects.  We ended up selecting Rally Software as it most comprehensively met our requirements.  For more about Rally, check out my post Tearing up the spreadsheets....our move to Rally Software.  We've been very happy with Rally and plan to continue using it in the future.  It's very flexible and extremely scalable.