Trello in agile teams: best practices João Craveiro Agile Connect Meetup April 2017

Meet João est. 1984 | ISTJ Lisbon, Portugal J Product Manager at Premium Minds Assistant Professor at U. Lusófona Software Engineer at Premium Minds Researcher at LaSIGE Teaching Assistant at FCUL Freelance web developer ...

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This talk Why (not) use Trello Trello vs X ... X

Trello is Okay™ For non-development collaborative processes For small projects As an auxiliary coordination tool (e.g. between client and provider) If it simply works for you

Trello is Okay™ Say what you want, Trello is easy to use (but…)

It is easy to do it WRONG

I see this ALL the time...

Labels SUCK at conveying state

Notifications ● Labels don’t trigger ○ Notifications for people subscribed to the card ○ Board activity indicator

● No accessible record of ○ When labels have changed ○ The path through these changes ● If you are trying to get any metrics from a board (burndown, lead time, etc.)… History ...you don’t.

Accountability ● You don’t know who changed a label ● Sounds like witch-hunting, but it isn’t (necessarily…)

For card state, use LISTS

Starts with the basics and grow from there To Do / Doing / Done To Do / Doing 1 / Doing 2 / Doing 3 / … / Done-done You can also break down your To Do (e.g. Backlog vs Sprint Backlog)

Sometimes, use CHECKLISTS

Finer-grained state “Grocery list”-like progress

Infrequent state Specific to a card or a certain type of card

So what are labels good for?

Use labels for stuff that doesn’t change (much)

Type of card Bug Feature Chore Epic Design Copy ...

Theme, epic, product area... Particularly interesting for roadmap boards https://trello.com/b/lgXkJqsF/ roadmap-example-folding-burritos

Criticality Some may call it priority... Justin Cone proposes a 4-label system: Blocker, Annoying, Cosmetic, Reference

Mix & match Type + (some) criticality Red label deliberately NOT named Urgent Bug label deliberately NOT red

Mix & match Type + theme From “this is an epic” to “this belongs to that epic”

What’s in it for me? Notifications History Accountability Inspect to adapt!

Backlog overview https://getcorrello.com/

Cumulative flow diagram https://getcorrello.com/

Cycle time chart https://getcorrello.com/

Cycle time https://getcorrello.com/

Sum-up

Resist the urge to use labels just because they are cute and colored The main stages in your workflow are better represented as lists More fine-grained or sporadic states are nicely handled with checklists. Use labels for stuff that doesn’t change (much) ● Card type (feature, bug, etc.) ● Theme/epic ● Criticality ● A mix among these

Nice to read ● Trello in agile teams: best practices, companion post to this talk https://productcoalition.com/trello-in-a gile-teams-3d0536fb518c ● Scrum with Trello, by Robin Warren https://www.infoq.com/articles/scrum-trello ● How To Manage Scrum And Kanban Teams In Trello With The Corrello Power-Up, by Robin Warren https://blog.trello.com/manage-scrum-and- kanban-teams-with-trello-corrello-power-up / ● 4 tips for working with Trello, by Justin Cone http://justincone.com/4-tips-for-working-wit h-trello/ ● Organizing a large product backlog, by Daniel Zacarias http://foldingburritos.com/articles/2015/07/ 06/organizing-a-large-product-backlog/ ● A Trello template for your Product Backlog, by Daniel Zacarias http://foldingburritos.com/articles/2015/10/2 0/a-trello-template-for-your-product-backlo g/ ○ With awesome inspiration boards

João jpgcc jpgcc_ !!!