Demian L. Neidetcher| scrum in a wiki page

At my job we have been doing scrum successfully. I've read 2 books on scrum and I've done it at a previous job. It's great, times would have to be very tough before I work on a project that does not leverage agile.

We manage our scrum process on 1 wiki page. I know I'm not going to impress anyone, it's crazy but it works. Previously I've used XPlanner, after that I used Jira. I hear good things about ScrumWorks, Rally seems too heavy and tabular. We only have 3 coders including me. For burn-down charts I fire up a spread-sheet. We needed it online because, understandably, the product owner wants to add to the backlog and re-order stories without physically being at one location.

Here's how it looks...

== sprint x ==

=== to do ===
- (1) as a user
- (1) as a user

=== doing ===
- (1) as a user

=== done ===
- (1) as a user
- (1) as a user

== backlog ==
- (1) as a user
- (1) as a user
- as a user

The product owner adds stories to the backlog and sorts them there (most important stories are on top)
The team moves stories for a sprint to the to do section of the current sprint
As we start working on tasks they go to doing
When tasks are done they go to done of course

Why this is good
It's simple. It's web-based. It works. You can diff the wiki-page to see who edited what and when.

Why this is bad
You can't automatically do anything with the data. You can't push a button and get reports.

Still scratching the itch
I've been thinking about doing a simple scrum tool for over a year now. With my hamster-on-crack attention span I don't have much to show. The current incarnation is Hibernate, Struts2 and lots of Spring. Stay tuned.