Yesterday, I occasionally stumbled upon miniSCRUM, a free online Scrum tool. It’s for sure not the first Scrum project management tool that I examined – but the ones that I’ve seen and tried so far were too complicated and/or required too much knowledge about Scrum or the tool itself or both. In the end, these tools always introduced more problems than they solved, they got in my development way and made me less productive, not more.
Not so miniSCRUM. It’s dead simple and therefore totally intuitive in its usage. In fact, it takes longer to read the documentation than just to begin using it. It’s a perfect example for the KISS principle: Only the bare minimum of Scrum features are available, and a five-minute introduction to the basic ideas behind Scrum is enough to understand them.
If you want to give Scrum a try, or play around with the idea of iterative project planning/estimating, or do some Solo Scrum for your own personal stuff, or if you don’t care too much about the theoretical background of Scrum (at least not in the beginning), then miniSCRUM is for you. It’s a perfect starting point to see how it feels and how it can work for you. All you need is an OpenID to sign in.
I immediately and hopelessly fell in love with miniSCRUM. I will use it for my own personal projects and I will also recommend it to anyone who wants to give Scrum a first try…