ScrumDesk
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NP Score: 44 Based on 9 reviews 
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ScrumDesk | |
| September 25, 2008 | ||
| Commercial, Free | ||
| Hosted/Installable | ||
| Other, Windows | ||
| IDE Plugin, Native, Other, TFS Plugin |
Net Promoter Score Definition
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is an attempt to distill into a single value, what users of a company’s products think of it. Users are asked a single question along the lines of “How likely are you to recommend this product to a friend or coworker?”, which is the question used by the UserStories.com website. A product’s NPS is determined by subtracting the percentage of people unlikely to recommend the product (0-6) from those likely to do so (9-10). A more detailed description including examples is also available.
ScrumDesk
With an experience for more than 4 years, ScrumDesk is a project management tool for collocated or distributed teams who need to manage agile projects with simplicity of physical task boards, but with good support for daily activities and guidance provided by tool.
Efficiency of the ScrumDesk is proven by more than 12.000 ISV and enterprise companies all around the globe. Academic, non-profit and startups organizations are able to get special free licenses.
ScrumDesk helps agile teams to do Scrum correctly and efficiently by great visibility and features developed based on real life experience of many agile teams.
Backlog management
Stories are displayed as the index cards, the form typical for agile environment.
Index card in ScrumDesk has been nominated as the best electronic card by ToolsJournal. Our card provides perfect visibility of important data while having possibility to provide more details.
Stories might be accessed through different views. Board view displays stories like post-its. It allows to zoom in or out, it allows to display thousands of cards without limits of the size. Stories can be positioned according your needs hence you are able to visualize backlog as you used to do on physical board. The board view is the best for planning activities and daily usage.
Grid view displays stories in Excel like table. The table allows to sort, filter by selection, to change an order of columns, fix them even calculate statistic information for grouped data.
Task board, aka Kanban board, is the best to use in daily sprints. Never lose your task. ScrumDesk helps Scrum Masters to identify who did not updated board and who did. There are other features helping to do Scrum correctly.
Tree maps provides unique visibility of your backlog. This feature has been created with collaboration of Mike Cohn when he wrote his article about management of big backlogs using tree maps.
It is possible to customize:
- release types and stages
- Story types if you need to manage feautres, epics, themes, technical stories or non-functional requirements
- User roles names which help to use ScrumDesk even in non-IT organizations
Prioritization
We understand how important is role of product owners. Using ScrumDesk product owners are able to manage stories using different agile prioritization methods (story types, themes, tags, Business value (positive and negative), risk, Kano model, MoSCow) with the best backlog visualization.
Planning
ScrumDesk provides unique possibility to plan more parallel releases and sprints. Capacity and current occupation of the team is calculated based on velocity of previous sprints, including Last 8 sprints velocity.
Retrospective
Do your retrospective even in distributed team. Just write down your ideas on the desk. Categorize them and vote for best ideas. Ideas can be published to Microsoft SharePoint as tasks. As it is important to help team by implementation of ideas, ScrumDesk allows to track the status of idea implementation.
Reports
Reporting is always improved acording to community requests.
Team is able to see BurnDown or BurnUp charts displaying remaining time or effort (story points). Release and Sprint Velocity charts allow team to better predict velocity they are able to develop features. ScrumDesk predicts end of the release using velocity statistics - minimal, last 8 sprints mean, 3 worst sprints and an average velocity.
Parking lot displays overview of stories according to themes. See overal project status as distribution of stories according to status.
Prioritization can be analyzed in Risk vs Value allowing to easy recognize what needs to be developed as the first, the second or the last.
Timesheet in ScrumDesk is not just about timesheet. Team members can identify if they are ahead, late or on-time.
Documents
Documents integrated in ScrumDesk summarizes information about stories, impediments, sprints, product backlog and timesheets.
Documents can be extended by additional documents as they are designed using Microsoft Reporting Services. Corporate documents stored in your Micorosft Reporting Server might be accessed from ScrumDesk user interface directly.
Integration and collaboration
Stories, tasks and progres can be exported to Microsoft Excel.
Team can stay in touch via integrated Skype or Microsoft Office Communicator access.
Status can be easy send to product owners by an email. All changes are sent to team via different channels like email, FlowDock, Yammer etc
Project data are accessible via REST API or directly from database as data schema is open.
Synchronization
ScrumDesk data is possible to synchronize with Microsoft Team Foundation Server 2008 & 2010 in both directions.
Changes commited into Subversion or BitBucket are written as comments to stories.
Other features
- Multiple tabs to work with more boards at the same time
- Stories templates
- Private, public or personal stories
- Flagged stories
- Attachments
- Links
- Impediments management
- Absences
- Pomodoro time management
- Screen capture
- Activities (latest changes)
- Integrated online and email notification
- Search and filtering
- Customization
- Meeting appointment and notes taking
Mobile
Pricing Info:
Project database can be installed as local (On-Site) or hosted (On-Demand). REST API available.
No limits on number of databases or projects. Features are not limited.
Pricing models
5 users are always free. 30 days trial period for teams of any size.
| Subscription | $15 per user/month. Full support included. | |
| Package | $180 per installation. Support and upgrades for one year | |
| Package + Maintenance | $50 per annual. Continuation of support and upgrades. |
Product Reviews
My first impression, the hosted configuration is too complex
John Boyer rated it a 2 on (April 04, 2010)
Summary: I chose this product because of reviews by others and the hosted version is free with less than five users. I have a Mac development shop but run Microsoft Windows in VMWare Fusion. I found the setup to be too complex for a hosted product because the user has to configure a database connection to a SQL Server. I expected a hosted version to not expose the datastore details to a user. In any case, after a software upgrade released today, 4 Apr, 2010, I’m unable to connect to the application database. Chronology: On 3 Apr, 2010, I first installed the product prerequisite: NET Framework 3.5. Then installed ScrumDesk using a link in my registration email. I entered the SQL Server host info, username and password, logged in as the administrator and added users. Then I setup a another user on a different computer. To do this correctly the administrator needs to remember to send the database connection info to the user using a button in the user interface. I installed an instance of ScrumDesk on the user’s computer and loaded the database connection info as described in their instructions. After setting up a few users, I transcribed my user stories from sticky notes. Incidentally, I like the backlog view, it's a nice emulation of a wall of notes. I closed the app and finished for the day. On 4 Apr, 2010, I opened the application and updated to a new version released on the same day. After the update, I was no longer able to login to the hosted version because of a SQL Server connection error. I hope I haven’t lost my work. Anyway, in my opinion, I think this could be a much better product if the hosted version removed the direct database connectivity dependency and refactored the user interface using something like Adobe Air or HTML 5. Conclusion: Given my experience, I would not recommend the current version of the product to a friend or colleague.
Use it!
martin tarasovič rated it a 10 on (March 18, 2010)
Very easy tool not just for management of the team, but also keeping it on the best way how to implement agile and Scrum. Guys did great progress since it was published here. We run it in enterprise company in distributed environment and we really liked it.
Review
Pete Boon rated it a 1 on (August 09, 2009)
Review
vasundhara JM rated it a 8 on (December 08, 2008)
Team Collaboration as I feel
Monika Kantorova rated it a 9 on (November 27, 2008)
Very handy and easy to use tool which supports development needs. ScrumDesk is useful through the entire life cycle of a product. Provides all important and real-time information about your projects (progress, statistics, teams,...) on very handy dashboard.
Nice and easy to use!
Daniel Ferenc rated it a 10 on (November 26, 2008)
Instant productivity
Rob Hale rated it a 9 on (November 26, 2008)
I found this product by accident when looking for something to better manage our product backlog which I'd previously been doing using Excel. The transformation was near-instant. Even though we were mid-sprint at the time, within a morning I had entered the entire backlog into the product. The next morning we had automated burn-down charts and management reporting on stories and project progress. The only discipline we have had to enforce is for the team to update their progress but this is very simple using drag and drop graphical task boxes which are moved between states (not started through to done). We opted for a local installation of the MS SQS Server database once we'd tried out the remote ASP model for performance reasons (but we are in Australia). The application itself is .NET and has slotted into our existing SQL server Windows environment without any problems or issues. Thoroughly recommended. The product itself is growing all the time and the guys supporting it seem very receptive to user-suggestions for improvements or enhancements and the quality of support received to date exceeds that of the many much larger organisations I work with on a daily basis. In short, this product gives us everything we need to manage our Scrum deliveries. The product has some 'extra' capabilities outside formal Scrum but these don't have to be used if you don't want to use them. (such as using phases for delivery as well as sprints). Our business clients like the product too and we had them sitting round the same table using the online Planning Poker to plan and estimate stories for the current sprint. We achieved a 200 story point sprint for a team of sprint in 2 hours which I just know that previously we wouldn't have been able to do. I have not thoroughly reviewed other Scrum products but just don't feel the need to do so having used this one. It does everything we need, it works and the people who wrote and support it are only an email away if you ever need help.
ScrumDesk rules
Peter Prokopcak rated it a 10 on (October 18, 2008)
We've been trying and using several scrum products, but this one satisfies our needs perfectly. I do not think you will need to search another once you install ScrumDesk. Peter.
