A Scrum board is one of the most popular tools used in the domain of project management. Scrum boards are used to follow the agile project development methodology to gain better productivity and quality.
With constant evaluation and limiting the work in progress, Scrum boards ensure that the team focuses on the tasks at hand and that the work is not piled up. This further ensures a more precise input for each task resulting in an overall optimum product.
To create a scrum board, we first have to understand its various elements.
The Scrum Roles
There are 3 Scrum roles that are used to identify the role of each employee involved in a task.
- Scrum product owner
A Scrum product owner is responsible for the overall product management including team collaboration, understanding the client requirement, and managing the product release and backlogs.
- Scrum master
Scrum master is the team leader of the scrum development environment. They are responsible for managing the work in progress and assigning tasks to the scrum development team. A scrum master has to report the daily or weekly status of the product to the product owner as well as the client and deliver the reviews and further instructions to the team.
- Scrum development team
The core development team involved in the project is the scrum development team. Each employee is expected to complete a particular task in a given time and in case the task can be further segregated, he is responsible for completing the sub-tasks with daily or weekly reports defining the status of the main task.
Scrum artifacts
- Product backlog
A product backlog is the description of all the tasks involved in the development of the product which is maintained by the scrum product owner.
- Sprint backlog
The sprint backlog contains the current work in progress. The sprint backlog is used to inform clients about the ongoing tasks and also to maintain the minimum work-in-progress rule of the scrum methodology.
- Sprint goal
Any major task completion is defined as a sprint goal which is used to define the completion of a particular phase in the development process. Each sprint goal leads to a new phase and finally to the product release after the development phases are complete.
Make a Scrum Board
Now that you the basic elements of a scrum board and its artifacts, you can create your own scrum board through the following simple steps.
- Building the outline
Building the outline or the structure of a scrum board involves creating a workflow for your tasks essentially from left to right where left represents the first action to be taken after sprint initiation and right represents the completed tasks. At the most basic level, tasks involved in any product development process are classified into three categories
- To Do: Tasks that have to be completed
- Doing: Tasks in progress
- Done: Completed tasks
Every task will have a status throughout its lifetime. So firstly, you have to identify the stages, which a task will go through, and represent these stages in the form of columns.
Let’s take the example of a software development process. A software will essentially be in the following stages
- Designing
- Backend development
- Frontend development
- Testing
- Verification
- Completed
So, the columns in the scrum board for the software product will be represented with these titles. You can create these columns on a whiteboard, in an excel sheet, or any other spreadsheet software.
Next, you can define the row titles according to your own criteria. These titles may represent the priority of the tasks represented by a number or they may represent the person responsible for certain task completion. The basic aim of creating rows is to divide the work into different categories for better visualization.
- Add cards
Cards in Scrum represents individual tasks. A card can be moved between columns to showcase the transition of a task from one stage to another. For example, in the same software development process, when the backend development of a task is completed we can just drag it from the “backend development” column and drop it in the column “frontend development”.
- Scrum events
The steps mentioned above only lead to creating the Scrum board but adhering to the scrum principles is another challenge. Including the scrum events on your board will make sure that you experience all the benefits of the Scrum methodology.
- The Sprint: It is the time defined for the completion of a particular goal which is usually 2 weeks.
- Sprint Planning: The product backlog is used to define the tasks to be completed in the sprint.
- The Daily Stand-up: It is the information regarding the status of tasks at the end of each day of the sprint.
- Sprint Review: After the completion of each sprint, the product owner and the client is given a demonstration to get feedbacks and receive further instructions.
- The Retrospective: This event aims at self-evaluation in which the team members and the scrum master review their respective performances and identify the areas of improvement.
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