Scrumwise review

I have been a fan of Scrum for many years now. I did my Scrummaster course in 2007 with Jeff Sutherland and since then, I try to use Scrum on every project I participate on. At most companies you can grab a blank wall and stick a piece of paper on it to create a physical Scrum board. The company I work for now didn’t have that luxury so I went out to look for a virtual scrumboard.

I came across several SaaS solutions which offered this functionality such as Mingle and Scrumworks but I also came across Scrumwise (http://www.scrumwise.com)

I registered and gave it a whirl.

Functionality:
The thing I like the most is that it’s basic and comprehensible. You can easily create tasks and sub-task and make a sprint planning. The burn down is clear and it’s your own choice whether you want to use story point, hours or just a percentage to track the progress of the work items. The team also like the simplistic interface which you can use to move tasks around and update the board.

Security:
One of the requirements of the company was that, as it is a SaaS solution, the data wasn’t located on American soil due to the patriot act. I asked about it and all of Scrumwise, both application and data, is hosted in Amazon’s European data centers, which are located in Ireland. So no problem there.

Support:
You can notice that is a solution which is being improved. Esben Krag Hansen which is the man behind Scrumwise is always available for questions and open for improvements. Patches or improvements are done regularly and I haven’t had any problems there yet. They just released an API which you can use to create or manipulate your scrum data.

Pricing:
You pay per user….easy. It is $6,- per user per month. Payment is easily done every month by credit card.

To sum it all up…..I really like this piece of software due to its simplicity and way of working. Thumbs up from our scrum team.