Scrum Ninja: Scrum made simple

Deliver the goods

ScrumNinja empowers you to deliver the goods to your management, product owners, and customers. They get what they want, and you get what you want—an elegant, intuitive tool that doesn’t create obstacles for your creativity and flow.

One of the most important and difficult challenges for developers is managing expectations and confirming accomplishments. Feature delivery and acceptance relies on being able to monitor and communicate what’s happening at any given time, and having the flexibility to change things at a moment’s notice. ScrumNinja makes this easy.

Wield the sword of simplicity

ScrumNinja was designed with conceptual integrity as its foremost goal—it does simple things very well. It retains the intuitive simplicity of index cards while providing the benefit of real-time updates and automated metrics. It also reinforces best practices for teams new to scrum.

We polled developers and asked the question—if one agile tool was simple and easy to use and another feature-rich, which one would you choose? 100% of the responses we got favored the simple and easy-to-use tool. And it’s more than that—it also needs to be easy to learn, easy to adopt, and easy to make changes once a project has begun. ScrumNinja was developed by Internaut, a contract web development team who understood these needs and wanted to create something that would best serve their own development efforts. Their goal was to make something that had the physical resemblance and functional intuitiveness of a real index card wall, plus key productivity features to make the tool powerful (such as automatic burndown chart plotting and history storage) but not encumbered by feature bloats that ultimately serve to bog down work.

Strong visual support

Virtual index card wall view

The card wall is designed to keep team members focused on what is pertinent to them—tasks. It’s also an essential view to reference in the daily standup meeting.

• Visually and conceptually akin to the agile index card wall
• Create, stack, and arrange cards via drag-and-drop—just like a real card wall
• Swim lanes reflect the status of tasks in the development process
• Perfect for any size team, from small to large
• Can handle even the most complex projects and supports a large number of cards

Backlog view

Our "one backlog" view is designed to keep all the project information in one place so that product owners can remain focused on high-level business value. They can prioritize user stories, monitor progress, receive notifications when stories are delivered, give feedback on deliverables, and see when things will get done—without getting mired in development details. The backlog view also allows you to manage multiple teams.

Powerful story and task model

Stories are product features with high-level business value, organized in the backlog by priority and rated by relative complexity. Using story points levels the playing field between junior and senior developers.

The card wall reflects the breakdown of each story into individual tasks, which serves to provide a valuable process of discovery, as well as keep developers focused. Every task has a remaining-hours estimate attached to it, which is used to automatically calculate the burndown. Optionally, burndowns can be calculated using only story points.

High-level activities happen on the backlog, while low-level activities happen on the card wall. This differentiation keeps product owners focused on stories and developers focused on tasks, thus eliminating confusion.

Drag-and-drop functionality is used to easily re-prioritize user stories on the backlog and update status on the card wall.

Powerful planning and estimating capabilities

• Plan and estimate sprints with ease
• Dynamically explore different projections of delivery dates and future sprint scenarios by adjusting initial velocity
• Easily import your user stories from planning sessions to the backlog with the simple text import feature
• Milestones group feature sets and can be used to track release deadlines for higher-level project management integration at the enterprise level

Additional productivity

• Explore different projections based on time and team velocity
• Automatically archived past sprints, can be referenced for information about tasks and burndown
• Powerful import and export capabilities
• Flexible tagging capability allows customized organization of stories
• Search stories by title, story points or tag
• Search results are displayed in the context of the backlog timeline
• RESTful API for projects, stories, and tasks enables custom interfaces and integration with third party tools

Engage your people

Collaboration and interaction are the heart and soul of agile. ScrumNinja’s intuitive user interface makes your team’s contributions instantly visible and understandable to each other, as well as to management—resulting in a more dynamic and proactive team. Unlike many tools that just get in the way, ScrumNinja’s refined workflow cuts to the chase of collaboration.

Understanding what everyone’s job is and how each person’s work fits into the big picture is critical to the success of any project. ScrumNinja allows every member of your development team to see his/her own tasks as well as others’, facilitating self-organization. This way, everyone always knows who’s working on what yet keeps focus on the job at hand. Our unique dynamic update feature enables multiple team members to interactively collaborate in real-time, regardless of how much distance separates them.

Communicating quickly and effectively is also critical. Making your process visible to everyone in your organization creates multiple opportunities to see problems before they happen and proactively make changes.

Respond confidently to change

ScrumNinja’s tracking capabilities keep your finger on the pulse of your project, allowing you to spot trends and be confident about the project decisions you make.

• Track progress at-a-glance by viewing completion percentages of stories on the backlog
• Status indicator shows whether your current sprint burndown is projected to succeed or fail

Deploy to suit your environment

ScrumNinja is available as a hosted application on our SSL-secured servers, or as a licensed software product that can be installed on-site.