Mon 11 Feb 2008
Another project that we have been working on is now available for preview. This time it is a simple tool for managing the Scrum process called “Banana Scrum”.
You can log in to the preview installation by following this link and using the name “admin” and password “test”. You can play with the application as much as you want – it works on a copy of the test database that is regularly refreshed, so you can move and delete and edit whatever you like.
This project was born out of our frustration with ScrumWorks. It was the application we have used for the most of last year, because it was the only free and decent Scrum software around when I went looking for it in January 2007. However, it had many serious limitations, exorbitant pricing for the “Pro” version which added basically access rights for user (not needed for small teams IMHO) and was done as a Java app – a design decision I couldn’t understand, since there is absolutely nothing in there that could not have been done with an interactive, AJAX web app.
That is exactly what we did – our little Banana is done fully in Ruby on Rails, works great with most browsers and supports interactive features like in-place editing, drag and drop or a nice, interactive burndown chart. As of now it is pretty useful and – as it supports multiple projects – we use it for our own work.
We hope to add more features soon and possibly some day make it available to the world. If you’d be interested in trying it already – drop me a line.
As for the name… well, there was a competition in the team and Tomek Paczkowski won it (and a bag of bananas) with this proposal.
February 11th, 2008 at 19:18
Hi Andy!
It really seems much better than Scrumworks and Rally in that it’s much more focused, and has less annoying features.
One thing I’m missing is drag and drop prioritization of items. When there’s a lot of them typing in priorities by number is a real pain.
Also, some design updates wouldn’t hurt đŸ™‚
I’ve been surfing around for an hour looking for a really simple tool for simple scrum management, you almost made it!
February 11th, 2008 at 19:33
Ok, after clicking around I see that there’s a drag n’ drop mode on the backlog, but not on the sprint page. It would be really useful if it was possible to reorder things on all pages, instead of having to move to another.
The same with assigning an item to a certain sprint, make it possible anywhere, just like you can set estimated time anywhere.