We had a successful alpha release of ScrumPad in February. Now we are working fast and furious on upcoming beta release in April. Today we want to share with you our philosophy behind ScrumPad.
If you ask us what sets ScrumPad apart from its competitors? We will say its simplicity and intuitiveness with its focus on collaboration at the core. Unlike many other similar tools, we strive to reduce the need for configuration. We believe in "convention over configuration" like the platform behind ScrumPad- Ruby on Rails. With ScrumPad, Scrum framework already defines the convention, we are making it available through the tool. If you are familiar with Scrum, you will feel right at home when using ScrumPad. It is the first tool to recognize the four core roles of Scrum- Product Owner, Scrum Master, Developer (team member), and Stakeholder. No matter what role(s) you play within a project, you only need to focus on your job, not spend time in managing the relationship among artifacts that you produce as part of your job. The tool automatically manages those relationship for you. You might be saying that is expected, otherwise why would I use a tool? I am better off using plain old Excel spreadsheet. We say you are absolutely right. And we make it seamless. We capture and manage the links among different artifacts (bugs, chat conversation, design elements, issues, time, impediments) centered around stories. We ask you to take a test drive. It is free. We would love to hear what you think. Even better, help us shape ScrumPad and make it your favorite tool.
We were also busy introducing Scrum Framework to non-profit organizations. We offered a Webinar organized by NTEN on February 19. The session was appreciated by the attendees. We received requests for follow-up Webinars on related topics. Please stay tuned for such seminars from our Web site as well as from NTEN's in the near future.
We also offered a seminar on Social Networking tools for non-profits as well as Scrum at the annual VAFRE conference in March. We are now preparing for a presentation at the Spring Scrum Gathering in Chicago. We will be sharing our experience using Scrum on a government project. We hope to meet you there.
Out of our busy life, four of our guys managed to attend a 2-day Scrum training class in Bangalore in the last week of February. The training was conducted by Pete Deemer of Goodagile (http://www.goodagile.com/). Even though the journey was hectic, but the trip was successful. Congratulations Omar, Zahid, Sohan, and Fuad for becoming CSM (Certified Scrum Master). Here is our picture with the instructor:
During the class, we met participants from Microsoft Global Services (India), IBM, Yahoo, Infosys, First Indian Corporation (an offshore office of First American Corporation), Cognigent and some other big companies. It was exciting to find out that even though we have been using Scrum only for 1.5 years, we can be proud of all the practices we have established so far. It seems that most of the attendees were interested in understanding how to mange projects with fixed budget as well as projects with teams at multiple locations.
Congratulations to Sohan for becoming an MCTS (MCP).
We have a new member in our Code71 family: Hafij. Welcome to the team!!!!
Expect to hear more about Scrum and ScrumPad after our trip from Scrum Gathering ....
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