21Scrum was launched on 21st June 2010 as the worlds first commercial available SharePoint 2010 sandboxed solution.  During the development of the product we had to make some tough choices and design changes to support running in the constraints of the sandbox.

Today that extra effort has paid off,  Office365 now supports Sandboxed solutions and we can confirm that 21Scrum is fully compatible.

Don’t delay get your scrum projects rocking with Office365 and 21Scrum.

Luckily for 21Scrum we have a very engaged product owner (that would be me @AndrewWoody), and we are building a great solution that helps us to do our development.  However I thought it would be an interesting excercise to allow the community to help in our sprint planning game.

Now I don’t want you to estimate the size of the stories, we’ve done that already;  But we would like to get some feedback as to what the most important features should be.

Please take a minute and help us choose which stories you would put into the next sprint.  You can choose one or more stories.

Note: You don’t have to be a user of 21Scrum (we would love to help you become one, but welcome your feedback all the same).

[polldaddy poll=4286934]

Tomorrow myself and James (@draken) will be travelling to Berlin to attend Tech.Ed Europe 2010 for what I hope will be a great conferences.

One particular area that really excites us is the beta launch of Office365, with the upgrade of SharePoint Online to 2010 it opens up a great opportunity for people to use the apps we are building at 21apps.

Office 365 Includes:

21Scrum – Tech.Ed Special Edition

A big fat discount on the license costs for 21Scrum.

For one day only we will be selling 21Scrum at

Single Site collection Edition        $50  $150

Five Site Collection Edition           $200  $375

Farm Edition                                       $500  $1500

Discounts will be shown at the Checkout.

http://www.21scrum.com/buynow/

Don’t miss out on this one off one day deal – and join me in celebrating my birthday.

We have discovered a lot during the development of 21SCRUM and will be sharing details of these lessons in future posts.  The most important of these lessons is that the SharePoint Sandbox really is a viable platform on which to build solutions.

Download your trial copy

The 21SCRUM Team

21SCRUM is a simple scrum solution that is built on Microsoft SharePoint 2010.

Working in SharePoint for many years I have always struggled to bring the core project sites together with the development teams needs for a good scrum tool.  SharePoint is the place where projects are based, the documents, collaboration and information is all centred around the SharePoint sites,  but the key development information was always hidden away in another application.  

21SCRUM, formally called Project Aberdovey, was built to solve this problem.  Now you have the best Scrum tool right there in your SharePoint site.  21Scrum was built to make teams work better, it focuses on keeping things simple and making sure the tools did not get in the way.

We hope you like 21Scrum,  we would love to hear from you if you have any ideas, problems, questions or praise:

You’ll be please to know that coding is almost completed and the first official release is scheduled for 21st June. 

21Scrum is I think the first commercial SharePoint 2010 solution specifically developed as a Sandbox solution and I was very happy to see it get a mention on the official Microsoft Get The Point Blog – so much so I thought I would give everyone a sneak peak at some of the new look that Sam Dolan @ Pink Petrol has been doing for us.

Some of things that we have added since the Beta release

• - Add stories directly from the Sprint Planning page
• - Edit stories in Sprint Planning and Story Board
• - Delete Stories by dropping them on the Recycle bin

We have really focused on making 21Scrum quick and easy to use, keeping true to the white board and ensuring the tools do not get in the way of your processes.

Hope you like the look,  if you don’t it was Sam   – but i’m sure you’ll agree with me it looks cool.

With a deadline fast approaching, see for yourself at www.21SCRUM.com, the whole team is taking a week out to watch cars go around the track at the Le Mans 24 hour race.

Update

21 June 2010:  We are pleased to annouce the 21Scrum has been released.   Please visit www.21Scrum.com for more details and to get your copy.

Having been an advocate of SharePoint and Agile development for some time I have always found it disappointing that there has not been a decent solution for managing my Agile Projects in SharePoint.  I initially floated the idea of a scrum tool for SharePoint just under a year ago and have at last managed to dedicate some time in order to make this idea a reality – internally this is called Project Aberdovey.

Today we announce two things

• Project Aberdovey will be called “21Scrum – Scrum for SharePoint“

21Scrum

21Scrum is a Sandboxed solution that works with all editions of SharePoint 2010 including SharePoint Foundation.

The solution is made of up 3 key areas

• Sprint Planning
• Burndown Chart
• Story Board

Sprint Planning

All of your backlog items are maintained in a SharePoint list,  you are free to extend the list to add additional metadata and views to make management of the backlog easier.   Planning your sprints is done using the Sprint Planning board where you plan as you would with a white board moving stories between the backlog, current and next sprints.

Sprint Planning

Visibility is central to Scrum projects and the Burndown chart provided gives you a real time view of how you sprint is progressing against the ideal.

Story Board

The story board is what the team uses during the Sprint, ideally this is a big white board in the team room – with distributed teams this is not viable.  The 21Scrum story board provides this white board view and, like the Sprint Planning, allows the team to drag and drop stories as they progress through the stages from Not Started to Done.

Getting Started

A quick guide to getting started with 21Scrum

1) Download the 21Scrum Sandboxed solution – rename the file from .zip to .wsp

21Scrum has now been released – check out the fully featured trial.

2) Navigate to the Solution Gallery in the Site Collection you want to deploy 21Scrum and click upload solution (in the solutions Tab)

3) Upload the 21Scrum solution and activate it

4) Activate the Features

21Scrum is divided into two part

• * Site Collection Feature which has things like the WebPart definitions
• * Site Feature which enables the lists to support the team

This split allows you to have multiple independent Scrum teams working in the same site collection.

At the root site collection activate the Site Collection Feature

And activate the Site level feature in the site that you want to manage your Scrum team

5) The Burndown Chart is provided as a web part,  add this web part to a page.

As you haven’t started doing any work yet your Burndown chart will look like this.   To make testing of the beta easier we have provided another web part.  The “Populate Demo Data” web part will create sample data as if you were half way through a sprint. Simply add this web part to a page and click “Populate Demo Data” and have a play with the Sprint Planning, Story Board and Burndown.

Giving Feedback

Having used a lot of scrum tools and often found them trying to do too many things we have kept 21Scrum very focused,  the ability to be able to get up and running quickly and for the tool to add value and not become an overhead was crucial.   However we may have missed something that you can’t live without!

The beta release of 21Scrum is available to anyone to download and use,  it is not restricted in time-boxed so please feel free to use this on real life projects.

All we ask is that you provide feedback so we can make sure that when we release 21Scrum it is the best Scrum tool available.

If you have a feature request or find a bug please add comments on this page to send an email to andrew@21apps.com

Numbers taken from a one week poll asking people which build servers they used on their SharePoint projects.

It’s very clear from this that people are in one of 3 camps of almost identical size

• Those using Team Foundation Server
• Those that user another non Microsoft tool
• Those that don’t do anything

Team Foundation Server

Installing and using, or developing against Microsoft SharePoint Server requires a fairly big commitment to the Microsoft technology stack, so the domination of Team Foundation Server is probably to be expected.

• If your a big corporate user of SharePoint you most likely have a deal that includes TFS licenses
• You have likely committed to Microsoft as the platform of choice across the board
• If your a Microsoft Partner delivering products and solutions you will have a big investment in Microsoft licenses, and also a duty to adopt the MS recommended path
• TFS is a good solution,  and it’s getting better in 2010

Non Microsoft Tools

I was surprised by the mix of Non Microsoft tools,  having looked at what you get for free and the costs for licensing beyond that I would have expected Team City to have a bigger following.  Perhaps the reason for not being higher is jetBrains being thought of a Java based?

I bundled CruiseControl and Cruise together,  in hindsight I should have split them as they are totally different products.   I will make the assumption that most are using CruiseControl as this was really one of the first decent automated build tools to target the .Net platform.  People have got to know it an have scripted automation for their non SharePoint projects already.

Final Builder I have always liked the look of;  I really do find the whole raw XML editing that we have to do in any build automation a bit like developing against SharePoint,  it’s ok but the tools really should be better than this.   Final Builder has a great product, but the cost per user is perhaps the barrier here.

Other

Some people had build servers but didn’t use it for SharePoint – would really count those as None.

Others listed the source repository (SVN) or scripting language (msbuild, nant) so I assume that the build is done manually using batch files rather than via a dedicated build server.

Also someone listed Hudson,  something I had personally never heard of, but will bundle with the Non Microsoft Tools.

None, we don’t have a build server

This was probably the biggest surprise to me,  and perhaps not the way you might think.  I was actually surprised that only 35% of people indicated that they did not have any form of build server for their SharePoint projects.  

Based on my years of doing consultancy gigs I found that the majority of companies that I went into to do work didn’t have anything even close to an automated build server.  Heck some don’t even have source control for the code!

So I can take a couple of things from this

• People who don’t were too embarrassed to answer
• SharePoint development has moved on significantly and most teams now have proper build servers
• The readers of my blog are not representative of the wider SharePoint user base

Conclusion

There are still a lot of SharePoint teams out there that have yet to get the benefit from automating their builds,  who will undoubtedly be spending many hours manually putting things together the night before Go-Live.  

For these people, and those moving into SharePoint for the first time, there is a need to provide more information on why investing time in getting your automated build in from the start can make huge savings over the life of a project.  Providing walkthroughs on how to do this and some of the challenges you will encounter along the way.

Based on the feedback I could look at doing TFS first,  but I know that for teams with nothing setup yet this is going to be a big stumbling block.  Trying to convince you boss to roll out Team Foundation Server just so you can automate your SharePoint build is not an easy argument to have.   I will instead look at the options allowing you to get up and running quickly and more importantly without needing to get budget for licenses. 

I will start with Cruise,  and I will be dog fooding this for real on Project Aberdovey.  

Thanks to everyone who took the time to vote,  I would love to hear your own take on what the numbers mean to you and your experience with automating builds in SharePoint.

UPDATE:  Project Aberdovey is now live and called 21SCRUM

Download a trial from www.21scrum.com

Being an advocate of SharePoint as an application platform I looked long and hard for a decent implementation of a Scrum and have always been found wanting.  I have seen simple examples where any power user could set things up but found the lack of any Burndown charts meant you lost probably the most important part of Scrum – the visibility.

I have found that VersionOne is one of the best products on the market, although it has a lot of options which tends to put off new teams.

For those that use Team Foundation Server your probably going to head towards the Scrum for Team System developed by Conchango.  I’ve not used this in anger so am unable to comment on how well it works however this solution is not really a SharePoint specific solution as it requires you to make the commitment to using Team Foundation Server.

Bil Simser did a good post on scrum tools,  although its nearly 3 years old still has some good links.   Again however the tools are not specifically SharePoint.

Why the SharePoint Obsession?

SharePoint is the collaboration tool of choice, companies have deployed it and it is being used with varying degrees of success.  People have become familiar with the how to add items to a list, how to upload documents into a document library and for the more advanced how to build engaging dashboards.

What is the biggest thing you get from adopting scrum?  ‘Visibility’

What do you need to encourage to make Scrum work?  ‘Collaboration’

SharePoint is the natural platform choice on which to build a Scrum tool.

Introducing Project Aberdovey

As with all good development teams I think it is right that your development project should have a name,  and in keeping with some big companies in the Seattle area 21apps uses place names.   Aberdovey, or as it’s spelt in Welsh Aberdyfi, has probably one of the best beaches in the UK and is located 50 miles west of the office.

Put simply, Project Aberdovey is a Scrum tool for SharePoint.

There are a few aims for the project:

1. Produce a fantastic Scrum tool built on SharePoint
2. Develop the solution using agile techniques including TDD
3. Dogfood the solution as soon as possible – what better way to develop the right solution
4. Open development – I want to give feedback on the challenges but also welcome your input

I will be looking for ways to give people visibility,  I am looking at codeplex as an option but welcome any suggestions.