Welcome to Scrumex’s documentation!

Scrumex is a tool for project management using Scrum as framework.

It allows you to create new projects, invite your team members, create a project backlog with user stories and work them out using sprints.

Why Scrumex?

  • Simple application of Scrum principles
  • User stories, backlog, teams, burndown charts.

Features

  • Create a new project
  • Invite team members to collaborate to your project
  • Write user stories
  • Vote stories with team members in a collaborative way
  • Build an organise your user stories with a single backlog
  • Create and monitor Sprints with your team and a simple burndown chart

How to create a new project

Scrumex let’s you create new project to manage your product backlog.

note: you can create or manage your project using the menu on the left side at any time, as long as you are the creator of the project.

How edit a project

  • Open the left side menu
  • Click on the item projects
  • Click on the link edit

Owner of a project, restrictions

Everything is Scrumex belongs to a project. The backlog, team members, sprints and stories are items of the project itself. The creator of the project is the only person that can edit, modify and invite members to collaborate. The rest of the team has full access to the items of a project but cannot invite other team members to collaborate, can’t delete a project and can’t edit its name.

How to create a new story

To creating a new story open the left side menu and click on New Story

You will be asked to give the story a name and fill in the content.

How to write a good user story

One the the best ways to write a user story is to follow the default format provided by Scrumex:

“As a < type of user >, I want < some goal > so that < some reason >.

The story is considered done when I < action to perform > and < what should happen >”

Vote a user story

Open one user story and click on the link ‘vote’ on the right side menu.

It is recommended to give user stories story points. Scrumex comes with a story point format following the fibonacci sequence from 0 to 89. Members, however, can give a story ‘pass’ or ‘?’ if they are not sure about the sizing.

The voting happens clicking on one of the chips. Selecting one of the chips will submit and save your personal vote the story. They represent the complexity of the story in relation to time, risk of something going wrong and the level of uncertanty. The story points will favor the most conservative team member (the highest vote received).

If you think that the story points are not representative of reality, try to convince your team members to change idea and give a new vote to this story. That is the only way to increase of decrease the points.

If you do not want to use story points, it is recommended assign to every story in the sprint 1 point so that the burndownchart will give an idea of how the sprint is going. Even without voting.

Assign a story to a team member

By design, it is not possible to assign a story to someone other than yourself. This because we encourage ownership and team work over micromanagement. In order to signal to other team members that you are taking responsibility of a user story, click on ‘assign to yourself’ on the right side menu in the story. Assigning a story to yourself will make the story as ‘in progress’ when the status is ‘open’.

Receive notifications for updates on a story

In the right side menu you will see an item called ‘notifications’. A click on ‘turn on’ will subscribe yourself to notifications generated when the story changes. All notifications will be delivered by e-mail to all subscribers.

Backlog prioritization

Once you have created a few user stories, they will appear in your backlog by default. A new story is automatically added at the bottom of the backlog and so it has the lowest priority. To give a story an higher priority you can click, hold and drag a story up the backlog. This drag&drop feature is persisted and will give the stories an order of priority.

Create a Sprint

A scrum sprint is a regular, repeatable work cycle in scrum methodology during which work is completed and made ready for review. Scrum sprints are basic units of development in the scrum methodology. They have a name, a start date and an end date. They are a collection of user stories that the team agrees can be done between the end and start of the sprint cycle. Usually sprints are 1 or 2 weeks long. It is recommended to not start a new sprint until the previous one is completed and all user stories that are not yet done moved back in the backlog. It is also highly recommended to have consistency on the work cycle of all sprints. Each sprint should start right after the previous one and should have the same length in days.

Add stories to a sprint

Once a sprint is newly created, the user stories can move from the backlog to the sprint. To do so open the stories on top of the backlog and click on ‘edit’ that is found on the sidebar on the right side of the story. This will list all active sprints that you can choose from, select the sprint in which the story should be moved to and click on ‘save’.