Your thoughts on Zoho Sprints
Hello,
We recently were provided with Zoho Sprints to manage our projects. We are using the scrum method.
I would like your feedback on Zoho Sprints in general and on these points in particular :
1- Backlog - ZS allows you to add "tasks" in the product backlog, which should only include "stories" - when with the scrum method, tasks are added during the sprint planning. So technically the tasks should be in the sprint backlog. ZS considers stories and tasks as items, the impact is that if you do not include all your project's tasks in the backlog, you can not really monitor the project completion percentage. If my backlog has 10 stories - ZS calculates a story to represent 10% of the project, because the project has 10 items. Now in my sprint backlog I add 10 subitems (tasks) to a story, ZS recalculates my project with 20 items... Considering my "stories" are not going to change, shouldn't the project stories be the only items?
2- Burndown chart : when we were manually monitoring our sprints with Excel, we were using daily percentage completion + item weight. For example, if I completed 60% of a task weighing 7, then i had a weight of 4.2 to complete, and every day based on the percentage completed, the weight would diminish. This information is crucial to the scrum master for calculating the team velocity and anticipate. In ZS, you can only go from To-do to In Progress to Done (whatever name you give these titles). So until the taks is done, you do not know how advanced the team is in that particular task... I am not undersanting ZS logic here...
3- What do you do when you forget to update the info in ZS, for example if you forgot to complete a sprint, you can only complete it at the time you are actually doing the action of completing it in ZS. So even if you completed it on time, ZS data can only be registered in real time, therefore if you completed it on a Friday but are only doing the action of completing the sprint in ZS on Monday, the report will say you completed it with 2 days late... How do you go around this?
Do you use any other tools you find to be best for srum?
Your thoughts on Zoho Sprints
Here's mine: Why aren't Scrum Sprints good enough?
Now, what are your thoughts on tool use, specifically with regard to how they can sometimes constrain people's understanding of what Scrum ought to be?
I thought you had a typo and wanted to say zero sprint. Now I see it's a tool.
There are a lot of tools that can get in the way of empiricism by trying to be too predictive. This tool may be one that enables too much predictability - not that it's a bad tool but it may be set up with too many guidances or behaviors that try to help.
That said, I'd involve the developers and PO in picking a tool that makes empiricism easier.
Any tool mentioned here will garner many negative responses. Many people use Jira, Azure, and others.
As one of my friends said "a fool with a tool is still a fool" (not that you're a fool, it's just a funny saying). Whatever tool you pick has to solve a purpose, not create it's own.