How scrum tools may change your agile software development approach

Abstract

A major problem for distributed Scrum teams is proper communication between the involved parties to ensure the quality of the final product. This is especially true for coordination issues such as sharing requirements, time schedules, to-dos and code artefacts. Hence, ScrumMasters complain frequently about software tools not suiting their daily needs when supporting agile teamwork, finally leading to the fact of not using a Scrum tool at all. In this paper we describe the extensive interviews held with selected ScrumMasters in which they explained their current tools and the existing gap to their real needs. Within this context, they were able to define the features and aspects they really need. After collecting those requirements for their daily work, we extracted the most wanted ingredients, prioritised them and finally forged them into an Open Source tool called Scrumpy, helping us to present a first solution, which focuses on the agile philosophy of Scrum and the elements needed most by ScrumMasters. Features of Scrumpy include, for example, web-based access to the task board with real-time updates, advanced dashboard visualisation techniques and a sophisticated chat system, which enables effortless communication for distributed teams. Although we already have first anecdotal feedback from users, we plan to improve the tool in a next step by adding more commodity features, perform additional mobile usability tests and systematically evaluate Scrumpy with a large number of end users.