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IBM ApptioScrum
Scrum teams will love our highly customizable boards, lists, and other team related features.
Targetprocess has built-in support for all the usual Scrum practices and events. From sprint planning to sprint retrospective, our highly customizable views are here to help.
Looking for your product or sprint backlog, story or task progress, burn-up or burn-down charts, definition of done or retrospective log? You’ll find all these and more supported in Targetprocess.
Let’s have a run through some of the views or reports that are applicable when doing Scrum.
Sprint Cadence
Firstly, you may want to set-up your sprints in advance and share your sprint cadence while also seeing the cadence of other teams. It also allows you to see or add important upcoming milestones or events.
Backlog Management
As well as the sprint itself, the backlog is an essential and basic practice in Scrum. Our simple list view lets you manage backlogs easily. You can add, order, or prioritize your work in both a product or sprint backlog. Here we’ve applied custom color-coding to highlight items in the current sprint. Did you know our product backlogs can hold and show Epics, Features, User Stories, and Bugs in a single ordered list?
Backlog Refinement Process
We can use a couple of pre-sprint states in our work-item state process to track the progress of story refinement. These per-team configurable states show the real workflow used in your team.
Planning Poker
When reviewing and discussing the work-items in your team, it’s common to use planning poker as a collaborative estimation practice.
Are you all in the same room? Use physical cards to get maximum engagement.
Is one of your team dialed-in via a remote video or audio connection? Put the physical cards aside and go digital. There’s no need to use a separate website or mobile app. As a facilitator, just start a game of planning poker from within the work-item in Apptio Targetprocess, share the game session hyperlink to your team members using email or any other communication tool, such as Slack or MS Teams, and you’re good to go.
Convert and/or Split
In backlog refinement, you’ll often find that a work-item initially added as a user story is much bigger, and should actually be a Feature or even an Epic. Simply convert it to the correct type and continue refining it.
Even if the story fits in one sprint, it’s good practice to split it by value into separate smaller stories. You want to learn fast and don’t want to make your QA team member work weekends, right?
Comments and History
Capture highlights of the refinement discussion in comments and see the history of all changes on your work-items.
Sprint Planning
The sprint starts with Sprint Planning, so let’s plan your upcoming sprint by moving work from the product or team backlog to the sprints backlog and keep an eye on available capacity vs load. Are you breaking user stories into tasks? Easily add tasks to a story and estimate them in hours. Are you pair-programming or mob-programming work? Assign as little or as many people to a story or task as needed. And of course, don’t forget to collaborate on and set a sprint goal so you focus on the goal and not just the planned or forecasted work.
Sprint Progress and Daily Scrum
While Sprinting, track feature, story, and task status using a Kanban board for Stories and Bugs, or use a simple Scrum board for seeing your tasks. Here we’ve grouped tasks by story. This allows us to easily update their status and focus on finishing them first before starting something new. Are you optimizing flow yet? Set WIP limits on your Kanban columns and Targetprocess will highlight the column where you are at or above your limit. Anything blocking you? Add an impediment and show what work is affected by it. Of course, we have burndown and burnup charts, a picture is always better than words, right?
Sprint Review
In Sprint Review, you can show how well you did using the relevant sprint metrics on our dashboards and reports. Next, capture any feedback on the demonstrated new version of your working product as new items on your backlog, and relate them using dependencies or parent-child relations to any just demonstrated user story or feature. Someone present at a remote sprint review without a Targetprocess licence? No problem. Just invite them to share their feedback using the Service Desk idea capture functionality.
Lastly, review the updated product backlog or feature roadmap with stakeholders and easily highlight any recent changes.
Sprint Retrospective
Of course, the best retrospective meetings are done face-to-face using real post-its or other physical objects, as they help to collaborate, focus and discuss. Yet if you are working remotely and want to check team happiness, capture and categorize any feedback item, or just record a high-level summary, you can do so in Apptio Targetprocess.
Whether physical retrospective or not, turn the most important issues into actionable items and add them to your sprint backlog.
