SM - Getting started

Scrum Maister app is on a mission to make work simpler, clearer, and easier. Its intelligent analytics allows teams to improve how they write issues, work in sprints and discuss in retrospectives.

Scrum Maister (or simply SM) key “weapon” is delivering consistency in everything the teams do - it keeps track of the multitude of development activities and makes sure the teams not only use Agile, SCRUM, Jira to the best extent, but also automates various checks and generates timely suggestions that are easy to follow - for teams of all sizes and compositions.

It does not force you into following Scrum or enforce doing things by the book. Instead, it offers gentle assistance and kind reminders on certain activities that may help the team to deliver a successful sprint, component, and product. Scrum Maister brings consistency to development practices at 4 stages:

• backlog grooming and management

• daily standups, syncs and interactions

• ongoing work analytics, analyzing blockers and patterns in work

• retrospectives on past sprints

Contents:

Setting up and Administering the app

The app administration is done on a project level. Scrum Maister needs to be activated for each project you intend to use it for - it is disabled by default.

To access the Scrum Maister admin menu, open a Jira project, navigate to the left-side Project menu and select “Project settings” (you must have project admin permissions):

Open

Scroll to the bottom of the panel and open “Scrum Maister”. The app settings will open on the right.

Open

Activate Scrum Maister by setting the toggle into the green state. If the project you work on has no fixed sprints and follows Kanban work principles, do not forget to switch on “Kanabn project” toggle, to switch SM into the Kanban mode.

Most of the checks performed at Issue, Sprint, Retrospective level are configurable - they can be disabled or the threshold values modified. We work on extending the customization capabilities of the administration menu and offering more custom checks.

Check out the Advanced Configuration guide for additional options for customizing SM and integrating it with your organization.

Managing backlog

First steps

Start with creating a new issue in the backlog - once done, click on “Open check-up by Scrum Maister” in the side panel of an Issue view.

You would need to grant the app permission to access the user profile - click “Allow access” and review the permissions required.

Once active, it will produce a list of suggestions on how to make the issue better - in terms of Agile practices, teamwork, and ways Jira features are used. All recommendations contribute to the “SM score” - a relative measure that can be improved by following the advice in the side panel. SM performs more than 20 checks for different aspects of issue quality.

The checks are divided into 3 dimensions:

• Following SCRUM - which of the main SCRUM principles or ideas are followed.

• Well-structured -  whether the issue is divided into smaller sub-items and tied to higher-level issue types.

• Completeness - how well the issue is utilizing built-in Jira functions.

Definition of Done

One of the keys to successful deliveries is actually finishing work - and the Definition of Done is one of the simplest and most efficient tools for this purpose.

Simply set up a list of actions to complete for each issue type, to be considered “Done” in the SM - Administration “Definition of Done“ tab.

Pick the issue type and enter each action on the new line:

Save it and navigate to any bug in the project. Each action entered into the administration menu will have a corresponding checkbox. A user can check them one by one once this activity is completed:

More granular control of DoDs based on issue labels

Many issues of the same type have different specifics based on their nature (i.e Technical and Non-Technical stories).

SM allows specifying different DoDs that are applied based on an issue label - simply put the tag on the first line of the desired DoD as “<Label>:” and type the DoD below, each item on a new line.

You can use as many labels as you want, just add DoD items below and follow “<Tag>:” format

Example of a DoD that will only be applied to issues labeled “Technical”:

If you start your DoD definition without a tag, the next items will be considered as default and will be applied to all issues of this type. Add tag-specific DoDs below it to make it even more flexible. For example:

By using this DoD spec, all issues that are not labeled with “Technical” will have the first 2 items in their DoD. The ones with the label will have the bottom 3 items.

Getting the bigger picture

Scrum Maister allows you to put the issue score and each of the 3 dimensions of it into the perspective.

It calculates an average score for each issue type in each project. Then it plots it and shows how the current issue score compares to the project average. This and other useful functions are available from the issue view - by clicking on “SMart issue analytics” button just below the issue headline.

This opens a new section in the middle of the issue view. The first tab “Issue breakdown” renders an interactive chart that shows how this issue’s stats compare to the project averages:

From Backlog to Daily work

SMart Project Daily

The team’s daily work evolves around Jira issues - but there is much more to the teamwork than represented by bare issues in Jira. Scrum Maister offers a single pane view into the Sprint progression, starting with Daily dashboard. To open it, go to the Project menu on the left and click “SM Daily and Retro” under Apps section.

We suggest you start your Daily sync by looking at the SMart Project Daily dashboard every morning with the team to find out:

• the current team mood - whether the team is stressed, overloaded, or has concerns about the sprint delivery:
  
  

• the work progress - how much and what type of work is done in the last day, from closed pull requests to comments on issues.

• discussion sentiment - communication is the key to successful teams, Scrum Maister is equipped with a sentiment analysis model. It finds all negative wording and helps teams be aware of toxic discussion, frustration, anger in the comments.

• the likelihood of the successful sprint delivery (if working with Sprints) - or what’s the chance all issues will be closed by the sprint end date:

• issues to take an extra look at - Scrum Maister analyses all issues and spots potential problems in 7 different dimensions, from stale issues to scope creep in the issue content. It recognizes 3 levels of risk - from Low to High, based on how serious the risk associated with each issue is.

   

Measuring the daily team mood

The team mood analytics in “SMart Project Daily” is based on each team member’s feedback submitted using the form in the issue view. The results are cleared daily - so team members can vote just before the daily, and then review the results in the standup.

To vote, go to the issue view → Daily Stress-o-Meter tab of SMart issue analytics section. Pick the sprint you work on, and drag the sliders to reflect your current mood. If running Kanban (do not forget to activate the switch in admin menu!), select “kanban” from the list and vote

Once voted, it's is not possible for the same user to submit another vote until tomorrow.

Team mood and time

Scrum Maister saves results of daily mood checks and allows to track all 3 dimensions of issue quality over time. Simply navigate to “Project Stress Level” tab of the same section:

Unblocking what’s blocked

Being proactive in resolving blockers is important for the team’s success. SM visualizes all active issues (or issues in active sprints) that are blocked or blocking other issues and puts them onto the same graph. It provides a visual way to understand issue dependencies and unblock work success.

Open it via the right corner menu “…” and navigate to “SM - Blocked issues”. USe issue type filters to narrow down the search. Note, that the arrow direction indicates that the source node is blocking the target node.

When work is done…

Getting retrospective suggestions

Scrum Maister not only spots issues but also records them and their progression over time. This means, it is creates a perfect input for the retrospective. To open it, go to the Project menu on the left and click “SM Daily and Retro” under Apps section and in the app view click on “Retrospective inputs” tab.

From the list of completed sprints, select the desired - and Scrum Maister will render the suggestions for the team on how to improve the next sprint and make it more efficient, successful, and focused. Here’s an example of suggestions generated for a real sprint - in total there are more than 30 various suggestions Scrum Maister can help the teams with: