I was looking for Scrum tools, so I experimented a few of them and I thought all of them were overkill and tried to make you do Scrum the way they wanted. So I thought about the Agile Manifesto and wondered, what’s the simplest tool you could use to manage the Scrum artefacts? Besides pen and paper of course.

This is how I stumbled on Nicolas Martignole’s Excel template for Scrum on his blog Le Touilleur Express. And the truth is, you don’t need much more than an Excel workbook to manage your product backlog and track your sprints progress…

Nicolas’ template is fine but it has a few things I didn’t like, so I made my own. In particular:

• I made each Sprint worksheet standalone, and not depend on a System worksheet. So now all you have to do to initiate a new Sprint is to copy an existing Sprint worksheet and fill in the task list.
• I fixed the formula for computing theoretical remaining scrum units.
• I added conditional formatting to display the actual remaining units in green or red depending on whether the team is ahead or lagging.
• I tried to be more consistent in the use of colors, fonts and formatting.

Here it is, you can do pretty much what you like with it (it’s licenced under Creative Commons). If you have any comments I’d like to hear them.

Scrum Excel Helper Workbook

Yesterday at Software Development (www.sdexpo.com) Bob Martin gave a really good keynote exploring the history of the Agile movement. During the talk he overviewed the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship, manifesto.softwarecraftsmanship.org/ , which extends the values of the Agile Manifesto in very interesting ways.

Scott’s blog article