Comments on: Scrum on Demand – Getting Started with Scrum

By: The SCRUM Blog: What's the Deal with Story Points when Estimating?

The SCRUM Blog: What's the Deal with Story Points when Estimating? — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 15:06:15 +0000

[...] sprint? Heck no, plenty of Scrum teams estimate in hours and have great success, in fact, check out THIS article our CEO at Axosoft wrote on Scrum. Among other things he lays out a way to estimate without [...]

By: Alan Dayley

Alan Dayley — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 05:13:30 +0000

This is a good article about getting started with Scrum. It would be a great article if it didn’t dedicate so much of the content to selling a product.

I also think a physical team board with sticky notes and markers on hand beats any electronic tool for collaboration. But that’s another topic!

By: Grant

Grant — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:01:56 +0000

Hi
We use OnTime for bug tracking and normal projects. I would like to use it for SCRUM.
My question is can I use SCRUM for one project on the Tree and have a normal project running for our other projects, or when you press the “convert to scrum” button, will all my projects get converted to Scrum only?

Thanks
Grant

By: Hamid Shojaee

Hamid Shojaee — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 21:19:08 +0000

Actually, you can break down major features by organizing them as sub-projects. Essentially, each major feature (lets say “Reporting” or “iPhone Client”, “Work Logs” etc. as examples of what we do in OnTime) would be broken down into sub-projects of the “OnTime” project. Then we can group our list of “Features” by “Project”, which gives us a quick overview of all the items and their state by the major functional area that those items belong.

For us, a “Feature” is the smallest unit of trackable work. We don’t use the Task tab.

Finally, to get a perfect idea of where things are for a given functional area, we just click on that project (such as “Work Logs” or “iPhone App”) and immediately see a breakdown of hours worked, remaining, etc.

Hope that helps you. We think this is a very productive way of managing things.

By: PJS

PJS — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:55:37 +0000

We’ve been using OnTime for awhile now, and found that there are good things and bad things about it. Mostly I appreciate the dedication of the team, and their accessibility to answer questions.

I always take issue with how OnTime positions itself as a SCRUM tool though, since it’s lacking the basic, core functionality to break features down into tasks. Since there is no way to link the time estimates of the two items together, it’s nearly worthless.

What we attempted to do as a work-around, was to track time and work only in the tasks. This allowed us to get an accurate burndown, but it didn’t give any sense of the progress of a feature. We also tried tracking time only on features, but then we lost the ability to estimate time on tasks (without manually adding up the task estimates, and recording them in a feature)

In this regard, and it’s a pretty crucial part of SCRUM, OnTime doesn’t help at all, and actually creates more work than using an Excel sheet. It’s a very requested feature on their forums and feature-request portal. We’ve stopped using OnTime for SCRUM management until and if they address this. We still use it for defect tracking.

By: Scrum - PM Hut

Scrum - PM Hut — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 00:37:58 +0000

This is a good article introducing Scrum.

I think a valid question would be, how can I convince management to use Scrum (before convincing the team, which, IMO, is not that hard once you have management support).