Agile scrumban with Asana
Agile is revolutionary new way of delivering software.
Agile was designed to solve two fundamental problems
Problem 1 — Time to market
Problem 2 — Time to decision
Adopting agile and achieving the culture shift is the first challenge, to get a nice tool to practice Agile is the next one.
The tool is important for you to be able to use and follow the agile practices.Its also important to be able to achieve the above two main objectives of practicing agile.
Here i will share my experience of using Asana for Scrum and Scrumban Agile techniques.
Asana is a great tool to help with creating a project management practice in a software project and for adopting Agile methodology.
Good news is in Asana you can onboard your team and try it out for 1 month free !
The trial should also help you to decide if it fits your team before
adopting it.
Let’s go to the use case sample project following “ Scrumban” practice.
On our analysis of Agile techniques Scrumban [Scrum + kanban] was found to be best suited methodology for the project.
I dont want to share the technical details of the project as its another big topic . In short , we liked some practices from the Scrum and wanted to follow its approach of a shorter demo cycle of 2 week sprints but needed more agility to keep our required items longer than a sprint and was comfortable with a more Kanban form on the tasks itself.
Primary reason i would say was also that the product development had to start with uncertain user requirements and often user stories required a deeper R&D. Also we had the familiar problem of the client not sure of what they really want till we had shown a few demo’s to them.
You can read on further from the links below on Scrumban.
https://www.agilealliance.org/what-is-scrumban/
http://leansoftwareengineering.com/ksse/scrum-ban/
After embarking on the Agile journey with the project once we had done some demo sessions following Scrumban and got ourself acquited with our agile practice we decided to hunt for a tool.
Our priority was on open source and readily available tools for evaluation . And we wanted to be frugal to make sure we are not buying something that we cant use or can continue long term with.
I evaluated the below tools
- Taiga
- Trello
- Asana
Of the above I found Asana highly suitable and configurable and the icing on the cake they also had a mobile application which was quite user friendly. [Incase you want to use your long commuting hours to good use]
Application Journey
The Sprints were planned for 2 weeks duration and project Milestone was set up for 1 month duration .
Each Milestone was 2 Sprint duration.
For Scrumban I choose the below project structure, we explored the tool and it was quite easy to setup the stories with those nice tag stickers which resembled our sticky notes and agile cardboards we were using till then.
Now once the tasks were ready for the sprint they were moved into the Sprint Backlog.
The tasks was ordered into 4 columns in the below categories:
- Sprint Backlog
- Ready to do
- In Progress
- Done
In the Sprint planning session each tasks will be allocated story points and allocated to a person .
Here the story points had to be marked with “[ ]” as Asana doesnt offer a story point option for free users .
Once the tasks are completed and the “sprint was over” they were moved to tagged against the respective milestone for delivery
This is a simple illustration to show how to use Asana to manage an Agile project in Scrumban .
I want to share a few other useful links and References for your Agile journey
You can refer to the official version on how to use the Kanban board .
Custom template for plotting Sprint burn-down .
