In a Certified ScrumMaster training I did with Peter Hundermark [1] in Frankfurt a couple of weeks ago, he introduced us to a nice exercise: The Trust Line.

You and your partner are opposite of each other. Between you and your partner is a line. Now you need to convince your partner, opponent, to change his/her position and go to your side of the line. He/she will try the same with you. You win, if he/she is on your side. He/she wins if you are on his/her side.

There is of cause no right solution, but there is a wonderful win-win solution possible.

[1] Peter Hundermark is a remarkable Certified ScrumTrainer who lives and works in South Afrika, Cape Town. I worked with him several times after he became addicted to Scrum. Contact him at www.scrumsense.com or if you want to work with him in Europe. Contact us directly.

Target Process is a tool created by Target Process Inc. to manage agile process. They can support Scrum, Extreme Programming, Lean and others. The tool have a good set of features and some nice ideas to speed up the addition of data for your project. They also provide a Eclipse and Visual Studio add-in so each developer can see their to-do list right on the IDE. If you like to try it for yourself there’s a 30 day free trial available.

Starting
One cool idea from Target Process, is that they create some activity flows, so you can quickly navigate through the features that you need most, like of instance, create a new project. You can create a project, create releases associated to that project and features to that releases, stories and so on. So you can build your initial structure fast and start working. The “Features” works like an Epic or Theme for your stories and if don’t care for that it can be totally skipped. If you’d like to use it’s possible to determine an estimation and priority for the features but it really doesn’t make much sense to me. I’d prefer to see something simpler like tags for the stories. We talk about estimating feature so, of course we can estimate stories also. That’s the first problem i think the tool have, it’s only possible to estimate using time units, ideal or not. That’s no mentions to story points at all, this miss, pushes Target Process to field of time tracking tools, which is not a good thing. Other issue that’s recurrent on our reviews is the prioritization and I’m glad to say that’s Target Process solves it nicely, you can define a Bussiness value to each story but you are not stuck with that prioritize a nice drag-and-drop feature is available for that, it could be little bit more integrated with the backlog view but is nice anyway.

Running a Sprint
Target Process is suposed to work with different agile models, so they use the term iteration instead of sprint. On Plan Iteration tab we can create our sprints, define start and end date, etc. After that we assign our stories and go on. On the Taskboard there’s an awkward choice, there’s only two columns available Open and Done, where’s the WIP ? It’s on another tab Kanban Board, I really don’t understand why they went that way, but for it’s no good at all.

There’s also a lot of additional features like Impediments, Bug control, Test cases and a lot of reports including Burndown charts. Target Process can integrate with vast number tools like of issue tracking tools, code repositories and more.

Conclusion
It’s hard to say what I think about Target Process, they had good ideas, like the shortcut flows, but really bad ones like the Kanban Board. Overall the tool is ok but not very intuitive, could be more polished on the user experience, and of course the common problem of too much focus on time tracking hurts a lot.ScdrS

This is a review and a comment about the great article of Tobias Mayer: “The Heart of Scrum.” [1]

“The longer I teach and coach Scrum, the more I become convinced that the task board is the heart of Scrum. Without the task board there is no center, no focus, no hub.”

I completely agree. The task board is the center. Every team needs to have a tool that enables it to be self-referential. (A very good definition about what self-referential really means you will find here: [2]) Any system that wants to self-organize will need to have a possibility to get feedback about its own status. In Scrum the task board is the feedback mechanism.

“The task board generates collaboration. It is visual, it is tactile, it is larger than life (it is much, much larger than a computer screen).”

This is exactly what I mean above. The task board enables the feedback. ”The task board tells the truth, and it spreads the message: we are unafraid.” This is a very cool idea. That the task board gives the notion to everybody: “Come, have a look – we tell you the real status.”

“Scrum is the antithesis of the corporate cubicle divide-and-conquer mentality. We don’t need table tennis and foosball to appease us, to create an artificial work-life balance. We don’t need fun as an afterthought to work. Work is fun.”

I have never thought about this aspect. But again I underwrite Tobias idea. The task board stands as a symbol for collaboration. It brings developer out of their dualism with the machine and out of their ego-centric worldview. It creates a team spirit. It creates the idea, we are together, even if we only share this for a couple of moments. It stops the isolation of the modern industrial knowledge worker and creates a new team.

Tobias can express this much better: “Scrum is about whole people, not about skills. Scrum is not I but we. [...] Scrum is about tribes [...] [a] tribal member needs a sense of belonging. [...]“

I agree again. Scrum is about life, it is about creating a learning organism. Some of us call this the Scrum-Team. I join Tobias in the idea that Scrum is about more than being a cool process tool. (That is why I completely disagree with comments that Scrum is a tool or a process.)

“To live, to truly live, Scrum needs a heart. That heart is the task board. Without [...] it loses its focus, and without an outside controller [...]  to continually pump life into it, the effort will soon dissolve back into the dysfunctional process that it was brought in to replace. Without its heart, Scrum has no power.”

The last statement of Tobias is very important. Also my observation is that if you have no one who really cares about the heart, who makes the task board again attractive, who works on a frequent basis with the team, the whole things falls apart. Why? That is the question, why is the whole Scrum framework so weak? My 2 cents for this: Because it needs effort. In a great book: Biomimicry, Janine Benyus,  makes clear, that nature adds information to matter so that it generates a structure [3]. This adding of information is a continuous effort. In Scrum we need to do this effort also. If we do not spend this effort, the second law of thermodynamics will win. (The entropy of an isolated system not in equilibrium will tend to increase over time, approaching a maximum value at equilibrium. [4])

I strongly recommend to read the full article. It is a well written article that can show you how much love you can put into a simple thing like a task board.

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[1] The Heart of Scrum, by Tobias Mayer

[2] Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems

[3] Biomimicry, Innovation Inspired by Nature, Janine M. Benyus

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics#Second_law

Self-organization needs self-reference. In other words: A system has to be able to “observe” itself to organize itself. To enable a system to do so, relevant tools and methods are required.

The so-called Metaplan techniques have been developed in Germany during the 1970′s. This technique has been developed later to facilitation methods by companies like Contrain and Neuland. This method is almost unheard of in our branch, although it is widely used in many medium-sized companies in Germany. Software developing teams in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland have often never heard about the facilitation method before.

More and more ScrumMasters, managers, and team leaders can now read that by doing agile development it is necessary to “facilitate” meetings. They start reading English literature by Derby, Tabaka, and others. They are oblivious of the fact that the German tradition of team consulting has much more to offer that the weak approaches found in agile development literature.

The facilitation method is now 30 years old. It has been developed into a very powerful tool and can be used very efficiently in Sprint Plannings, meetings and Retrospectives. I use it, adapted to the task, in almost every meeting as a basic know-how. It is an integral part of our work with every organization that we coach. The teams often don’t know on which methodical basis they are working.

Scrum Tools are a topic that is very important for the readers of my blog. We will continue to write reviews every couple of weeks this year.

Scrum Tools | Reviews to date

• Agile Buddy
• Acunote
  
• Banana Scrum
  
• FireScrum
  
• Mingle
• ProjectCards
• Scrumy, Scrumy Pro
  
• ScrumDesk
• SpiraPlan
• Protonotes
• Target Process
• Taskboard
• tinyPM
• Version One
• XPlanner
• XPLive

About Tools

• The Good and Evil of Taskboards
• Distributed Environments

Other Scrum Tool Compilation Lists

• Scrum Tool Round Up