Using Trello effectively for Agile team

[khoinguyen-bee]

As many software projects are following Agile (Scrum and Kanban) for team development workflow, and using Trello or JIRA for task management, I am moving from JIRA to Trello but got some troubles, which missed lovely features or concepts that I was familiar during using JIRA, and I would like to list them here with my solution, let give your comment if you think it's good or bad practices

- In JIRA, there are many task type: Epic, Story, Bug, Improvement, Sub-Task.... also customized those types, but it's not on Trello. So I had to use label as task type, as much as I want

- In JIRA, normally we broke a user story to subtasks which estimate-able, and then total story estimation will be sum automatically from its subtasks. So I had to use card as user story, and then checklist as subtask, but I didn't find any way, even don't know how to give estimation on trello, it's workaround with Agile for Trello chrome extension, but not very useful

- In JIRA, a scrum board is separated into sprints, each sprint will be a board, but in Trello, I known it's not good practice if separating board by sprint. Don't know how to manage it

- It's also missing many features relating to scrum sprint like estimation, worklog, burndown charts... 

Could anyone is also running sprint well with Trello, let give your practice and then everyone could use it effectively

[Marta Galofre de Alos]

Hi Khoi,

Marta here, from the Trello team :)

I'd love to see how other people are using Trello boards for Agile workflows, but I'll also leave you some Playbooks my team has created for Engineering teams: https://trello.com/teams/engineering

I hope you find these useful! You can also check our inspiration board to see how others use Trello: https://trello.com/inspiration

For anyone else who feels like they have a great board to share, we'd love it if you could share it with the Trello community. Fill out this form to get started: https://trello.typeform.com/to/IT481Y 

These boards will be a part of our updated trello.com/inspiration project for shared Trello workflows.

[Kate Foster]

Thank you very much for showing your team's boards. That really inspired me to use mine in a different way. That should seriosly make my life easier.

[khoinguyen-bee]

Thanks @Marta Galofre de Alos for sharing those boards, because I moved from using Jira to Trello, so there are some confusing concepts between them, trying to adapt and use Trello effectively for my Agile team.

From your Playbooks, there are quite separated boards for different purpose which I didn't find an real example which running well with Trello and Agile, did you have any more complicated real case that we could learn from them.

Thank in advanced

[Jeff Tillett]

Have you looked at Epics for Trello? https://screenful.com/epics-for-trello/

This brings you "progress reporting", but not proper burn charts. It's a little more robust than using checklists in cards, as your tasks can still be proper cards linked to an "epic" card.

As for sprints, I actually do this at home. (don't laugh).

We have a "Backlog board" that has lists which represent epics. (The list is the epic in this view). We have one epic for each room of our house, then the backlog tasks under each room are all of the honey-do's/home projects we have for that room. (Hanging art, replacing outlets, installing new door knobs, etc)

Then we have another board that is our "Active Sprint" board. This board is set up as a proper Scrum board with "To-do, in progress, done". 

Every Sunday night, we do a retrospective of how the week went, and if we over/under committed to house projects based on what we got done and how we feel at the end of the week. At the end of the retro we archive our "Done" list after adding the current date to the list name.

Once our retro is complete, we decide what out next sprint commitment will be, and right click -> move any cards we wish to add to the next sprint to our "Active Sprint" board.

[Sami Linnanvuo {Screenful}]

Hi @Jeff Tillett thanks for mentioning our Epic Cards Power-Up. For those currently using it, we suggest upgrading to our latest Power-Up, Scaled by Screenful. It combines the functionalities of our free Power-Ups with automated importing of data so you don't loose any data. 

The Scaled Power-Up is free so you can just add it to your board. Feature suggestions are welcome! You can learn more from this blog post

This doesn't mean you can't continue using the other free Power-Ups, they are still fully supported and continue to be so! But if you use more than of them, you should consider switching to the Scaled Power-Up to have all features in a single Power-Up.