An overview of the tips and techniques for managing you Scrum (or Kanban) process in Trello. This is based on things I've seen teams doing while building http://getcorrello.com - Dasboards for Scrum and Kanban teams using Trello.
2. About me
Previously CTO at a small software company (2 Scrum
teams)
Spent last year building Corrello - a dashboard for
Scrum/Kanban teams using Trello
3. In this presentation
Board setup options
Labels and life without subtasks
Release management patterns
Useful plugins
22. Useful plugins
Corrello - Burndown charts, CFDs, cycle time, release
burnups etc.
Scrum for Trello - let’s you add Story Points to your cards
(compatible with Corrello)
Kanban WIP/Card Counter - let’s you set list WIP limits
Trello Business class - lets you use the Slack, Github and
Corrello powerups amongst others
Some of the things I’ve seen people doing and my impression of what the best practices seem to be
Pretty basic
sprint backlog
one or more ‘in progress’ lists
one Done list
Useful if you’re using a CFD to monitor where cards are building up
Lists can be archived when no longer needed, or moved to another board to be kept there for reference
Image in header is there optionally, can be useful if you have a few cards you want to make standout on the board. Possibly only makes sense if you have a board for use by stakeholders which operates at a high level
Also some other things you can do:
Assign members
Add labels (ie bug)
Add due dates (not very common in agile circumstances)
Add checklists (mentioned later)
Some people want to create labels for every kind of card they used to have in Jira - Task/Action/Project/Epic etc. This leads to pain and suffering
This represents the most I’ve seen people actively using
Bug is the first one to create and track
Urgent is similar, possibly you don’t need it but some people like to be able to see the urgent tasks on the boards as well as track historically how many they have had
Blocked: Some people use a separate list for this. I like to use a label as you can see which list it was in when it got blocked. Also, it should be contributing to the WIP for that list, assuming it is coming back soon and hasn’t been moved off to the backlog for later.
Some also using Labels for Epics, which seems to be the consensus on how to track your epics. This also allows epics to be split between teams on multiple boards
This is I think possibly the most common annoyance people have with Trello. I don’t think it’s a big deal, but obviously if a team decides they simply can’t work like this then Trello probably isn’t for them
Other option is to break cards up into small chunks and get rid of the larger card.
Markdown allowed in checklists so you can hack together sub lists. You can add multiple checklists if you want. So perhaps testers could have their own list separate from the devs.
This works (surprisingly) well and is probably the best approach I’ve seen to handling sub-tasks in Trello
So simple, let us never talk of it again
Allows PO to pull bugs etc logged into to prioritise and put them in the correct place on the backlog, without completely limiting people's ability to create cards on the board.
You could do the same but use Epics instead of Versions. Not that common but works well for some people.
For when you have too many of these lists and they are getting in the team's way. Let’s you plan upcoming releases out, then send cards to the boards when they are ready to be worked on. Possibly build up a ‘ready for dev’ list which you pull the next set of cards in to, then send all the cards from that list to the main scrum board periodically.
This also allows you to share a backlog between multiple teams