Agile Project Management: Scrum on Trello

There are numerous tools available for the project management, but of all of them, Trello has been the choice of many start-ups tracking Agile tasks. It is a powerful tool which is free, adaptive and offers real-time collaboration amongst the team members. But as they say, “with great power comes great responsibilities” is more than true in this case. Trello, having no boundaries regarding how to integrate it into the daily workflow, can also become a complete mayhem.

Therefore, I want to share the framework I have been following to manage Scrum projects on Trello.

I recommend creating separate boards for Product Backlog, Active Sprint, Sprint History and Sprint Retrospective. You may also have a separate board the Roadmap of your product or maintain it in an excel sheet.

Let’s discuss each board one by one.

Roadmap

A product roadmap is a general guideline for the stakeholders describing expected projects/features to be taken in the coming releases.

1. It communicates a product’s shared vision, direction, strategy, and goals.
2. It keeps everyone in line but doesn’t impose a strict timeline.

Product Backlog

A product backlog is a prioritized list of epics and user-stories for the scrum team that is derived from the roadmap and its requirements. The most important product backlog items or PBIs are shown at the top so the team knows what to deliver first.

Sample product backlog for one or more products

Our board contains separate lists for different products and an aggregated list containing cards in priority order which is the list to be used during a Backlog Refinement meeting.

Active Sprint

In the Scrum method of Agile software development, work is confined to a regular, repeatable work cycle, known as a sprint or iteration. Generally, It is two-weeks long and at the end of it, Scrum team is expected to deliver a “shippable product” containing the user stories committed during the sprint planning meeting.

Sample Active Sprint Board

The board contains six lists:

1. Sprint Backlog: It is a list of committed PBIs by the team moved from Product Backlog to Active Sprint during the sprint planning meeting. It is allowed to have only tickets/cards describing user stories and acceptance criteria. We, generally, do not tag any team member to a card here.
2. ToDo: The cards which are yet to enter the sprint pipeline but already assigned to a team member. If a developer does not have any card associated with his/her name in ToDo list then (s)he can go to sprint backlog items and pick one from there.
3. In Development: A list of all the tickets which are currently in progress.
4. Code review: A list of all the tickets which are currently under code review.
5. Staging (Testing): A list of the tasks which are ready to test and assigned to a QA.
6. Done (DATE from-to): The sprint start date and end date is mentioned on the list name and the list contains all the tickets which are completed and ready to ship.

Sprint History

The idea of archiving the completed items is bizarre. Therefore, a history of all the user stories delivered by the team is maintained on a separate board. This board is a stack of all the DONE items in a sprint having the latest at the top. At the end of every sprint, Done list is dumped here.

Sprint Retrospective

This board is used during sprint retrospective meeting. You should have lists according to the format of retrospective meetings followed at your organisation. The sample template here has three lists:

1. What went well: Describe all the positives.
2. What did not go well: Describe all the negatives.
3. Actions to take

Following the above methodology will set you up with project management on Trello. Please refer the sample boards:

Roadmap, Product Backlog, Active Sprint, Sprint History, Sprint Retrospective

Since I keep constantly tweaking a little bit with the Trello. I’m curious to know how others are using Trello for Scrum. If you have any thoughts or suggestions please feel free to comment below.