Scrumy Blog

Scrumy gets better for distributed teams. And glowier.

Mon, 18 May 2009 00:00:00 -0500

Scrumy distributed teams

As we've said before, we're impatient at Scrumy. One thing we've always found takes a painfully long time is refreshing web pages. So, we made it a goal at Scrumy to never force users to reload their page. And I think we've been pretty successful. Tasks and stories are added instantly with no page refresh. You can even navigate to future sprints and snapshots without refreshing the page, and without breaking your browser's back button.

One thing that always bothered us, though, was that any time two or more people worked on a project, they'd have to refresh the page in order to see what changes other people had made.

No more!

Now, any change made to a Scrumy project can be seen instantly by anyone who is viewing the project. And just to make sure you don't miss it, the tasks and stories glow green when they change.

So if you're sitting around in Auckland waiting for your friend in Seville to finish a task that's blocking your work, give your pointer finger a rest. No need to hit refresh, you can now use your free hand for other things like impatient finger tapping or pulling your hair out. And then, staring at your screen late into the night, you can breathe a sigh of relief as his task glows green and moves to the done column. You can finally get to work.

If your window is out of focus, you'll also get a numerical indicator of the number of changes you missed. The glowing tasks should stay glowing until you see them.

Live Updating is available right now to Scrumy Pro users everywhere. If you don't have a Pro account of your own, hop on over to the demo at scrumy.com/demo and watch people do stuff.

Read-only mode

Do you want to show the world what you're doing without giving them the keys to the castle?

Now you have the option to display a read-only version of your board to unauthenticated visitors. They'll get the glowy new Live Updates too.

Better, faster, stronger

Tue, 30 Dec 2008 00:00:00 -0600

If you keep tabs on our twitter feed, you've seen our weekly releases and all the goodies contained within. Here are some of the updates Scrumy has seen in December.

Scrumy got an official icon for Fluid, the Mac single site browser.

If you're on a Mac, I highly recommend checking it out.

The task editor style and animation got tweaked to make it feel more like a zoomed up task.

Pro users can now delete assignees and decide who gets stuck with Pink:

-We did major Javascript cleanup and optimization; Javascript execution is now more than twice as fast.

-We simplified our markup and reduced requests, which means interactions with the server now complete more quickly.

-There is no more Flash in project titles. We made the switch from sIFR to typeface.js, and we're happy we did.

-We moved to Rails 2.2.

And there were plenty of random bug fixes along the way. (IE7 is now fully up to speed.)

We hope you enjoy these improvements. Look for more to come in the new year!

Good news for the impatient

Thu, 20 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600

"I wanna go fast" -Ricky Bobby

What a society we live in. We want to get what we want, and we want to get it NOW. From fast food and microwave dinners to on demand movies and internet television, we live in an impatient world. But I'm not one to judge, I often find myself looking for something else to do during the eternal 45 seconds that it takes to boot my laptop.

We at Scrumy understand your need for speed, and for that reason, for the past few weeks we've been concentrating on making things faster and optimizing our code.

One thing you may have noticed already is that stories are now fully draggable. Pro users may know that they no longer have to select stories, press a button, and wait for them to show up in their backlog, now they can just drag a story to the backlog and have it show up instantly!

But we're not only speeding things up for Scrumy Pro users. A little speed boost that everyone might notice is in task editing. Adding and editing tasks is one of the most common functions, and some people think it should be instant. We agree, and now it is!

Other optimizations we've been working on are a bit more subtle but just as important. We've simplified a lot of the HTML by deleting superfluous attributes and unnecessary container elements. We've also moved more javascript calls to external files. What this means to you is that there is less code for you to download, making pages load a little bit quicker.

In addition to optimization, we've also put a little work into clarification. Now the "Loading..." indicator is quite a bit more descriptive, and selecting a story or task to move to another sprint more clearly displays what exactly will be moved or copied with it.

Hope you love the new optimizations and keep your feedback coming!

Slicehost!

Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0600

If you were visiting the site at 9PM CST today, you may have noticed this face instead of the usual Scrumy. That's just Carlton, helping us finish switching over to our new host!

After recent problems at Dreamhost causing frustration to us and our users, we've switched to Slicehost. This means the end of random outages. Additionally, since Slicehost gives us full control over our machines, we were able to further optimize things, and you should notice a performance increase. That and the new servers are just crazy fast.

Some of the things that snuck into this release:

Pro users:

-Limited access password: Set a password to give your colleagues access to your project without giving them access to the settings. (Settings -> Limited password)

-XML Snapshots: You can view an xml version of your snapshot by adding a .xml to the end of the url -The sign-in background kicked it up a notch. Try it as your desktop background, it does the job!

Everyone:

-Dragging tasks vertically scrolls the page to accommodate you.

-Various other things were tweaked, prodded, and slammed into betterness.

Let us know if you notice!

Scrumy gets a Product Backlog

Wed, 29 Oct 2008 00:00:00 -0500

"Scrumy's great, but where's the product backlog?" -Certified ScrumMasters everywhere

In the Backlog, you create stories independent of sprints. Some people use a product backlog as a master list of stories, and then pull a selection of those stories into a new sprint. If you can think of another creative use for it, go for it!

There are three priority levels for backlog stories: Low, Medium, and High. To move stories to a lower or higher priority, simply drag them up or down. The idea here is that you drag stories lower and lower until they eventually end up on the live board. Certified ScrumMasters everywhere like to prioritize their stories to see what should be done next. I like to call this implementation The Technicolor Waterfall (sorry if the "waterfall" word still makes you shudder...).

In the real world, you're probably going to be moving more than one story at a time. To move multiple stories from the Backlog into a sprint, click them to select them, just like you already do with tasks in the Dashboard. From there you can move the stories with the blue "Move" buttons that will appear, or you can click the "New sprint" button and start a new sprint with the selected stories.

As usual, you can enter in time estimates into your stories if you'd like, via the same mechanism as usual. Once those stories make it into a sprint, the time estimates will be reflected in the Burndown Chart.

If you don't have a Pro account, you can always play with the latest Pro stuff in the demo account, http://scrumy.com/demo.

We hope you like it!

Welcome to the Scrumy blog!

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 00:00:00 -0500

Hey everybody. This is the first post in our blog.

Since this is the first post, there really isn't much to see here. However, there will hopefully be plenty to see in the future when we tell you about all the sweet new features we're adding to Scrumy. But for now, since Scrumy just launched and every feature is brand new, we'll just point you in the right direction to learn all about them.

If you wanna see what Scrumy is, check out our colorful about page. Be sure to watch our infomercial, we spared no expense making it very professional.

If you aren't sure how to use Scrumy and don't feel like reading the entire about page, just start an empty project using the "I'm Feeling Scrumy!" or "Generate URL" buttons on the Scrumy front page. A fun little tutorial will guide you through the basics.

Do you want to give us money? We'll gladly take it if you sign up for a pro account. But if you really need to see what you will get for your money, you can check out the demo at scrumy.com/demo.

I think that's all for now. Please feel free to leave feedback or suggest new features in the comments, or email us at one of the addresses on our contact page.

Have fun using Scrumy!