Scrum for SharePoint

Agile teams are all about co-location and communication. We have a wall where tasks are posted. The wall is life. It is the source of truth. From the wall, the ScrumMaster (me generally) enters in the hours remaining for tasks and updates some backend system (in our case, VSTS with the Scrum For Team System templates).

There are many tools out there to do Scrum, XP, etc. and keep track of your items. I think I did a round up of the tools out there but I missed one. SharePoint. Yup, my two favorite topics, SharePoint and Agile, come together.

A friend pointed me to an article on Redmond Developer News (a new feed I didn't even know about and one that looks pretty cool) by David Christiansen called Building a Virtual Bullpen with Microsoft SharePoint. Basically he walks you through creating a digital bullpen, complete with product backlogs and sprint backlogs all powered by SharePoint. And easy to do, with a few custom views and all standard web parts and controls.

I remember Scott Hanselmen mentioning that they used SharePoint for Scrum awhile back on an episode of Hanselminutes. He said it worked well for them. I've setup clients using standard out-of-the-box lists to track Product Backlog items and such. The only thing 2003 won't give you are burndown charts. With Excel Services, a little bit of magic, and MOSS 2007 behind the scenes this now becomes a simple reality.

Check out the article to get your virtual bullpen setup and drop me a line if you need a hand (or just want to share with the rest of the class).