In today’s fast-paced and dynamic business environment, companies need to be agile to stay ahead of the competition. This is where project management tools come in handy. One such tool is Monday.com, which is an all-in-one platform that streamlines project management, team collaboration, and task tracking. In this article, we will take a closer look at what Monday.com is, its features, and how it can be used for software development scrum boards.
What is Monday.com?
Monday.com is a cloud-based project management platform that enables teams to manage their projects, workflows, and tasks in one central location. It offers a flexible and customizable interface that adapts to any project management style, including agile, waterfall, and hybrid methodologies. The platform’s intuitive design makes it easy to use, even for non-technical team members, while its robust features cater to the needs of complex projects.
Useful and Powerful Features
Here are some of the key features that make Monday.com a useful and powerful project management tool:
- Customizable Boards: Monday.com provides a variety of templates and board layouts that can be customized to suit your project management needs. You can create boards for tasks, projects, or workflows and customize them with different columns, tags, and statuses.
- Visual Timeline: The platform’s visual timeline feature helps teams plan and track their projects with ease. It provides a clear overview of tasks, deadlines, and dependencies, which enables teams to identify bottlenecks and adjust timelines accordingly.
- Automation: Monday.com’s automation feature automates repetitive tasks and saves teams time and effort. You can create automation recipes for tasks such as sending notifications, updating statuses, and assigning tasks.
- Collaboration: The platform’s collaboration features enable teams to work together in real-time. You can add comments, attachments, and mention team members to keep everyone on the same page.
- Analytics: Monday.com’s analytics feature provides insights into team productivity, project progress, and resource allocation. It helps teams identify areas of improvement and optimize their workflows.
Scrum Development and Best Practices
Scrum is an agile framework that is widely used in software development. It is based on iterative and incremental development, where teams work in short sprints to deliver working software. Scrum emphasizes collaboration, flexibility, and continuous improvement. Here are some best practices for implementing scrum using Monday.com:
- Create a Scrum Board: Create a board that reflects the scrum process. You can customize the columns to represent the different stages of the scrum, such as backlog, sprint planning, sprint backlog, and sprint review.
- Use Sprints: Break down your project into sprints, which are short iterations of 1-4 weeks. Use Monday.com’s timeline feature to plan and track your sprints.
- Assign Tasks: Assign tasks to team members and set deadlines. Use automation to send notifications when tasks are due or completed.
- Hold Daily Standups: Hold daily standup meetings to keep everyone informed about progress, challenges, and next steps.
- Conduct Sprint Reviews: Conduct sprint reviews to evaluate the team’s performance and identify areas of improvement. Use Monday.com’s analytics to track progress and measure performance.
Boards vs Dashboards
Monday.com has 2 major pages: Boards & Dashboards. Basically, boards are mostly used to enter information while dashboards are used for presenting and analyzing various data. Dashboards can have different widgets, like Graphs and Filtered elements that allows presentation of simple BI logic. In this example i’ve created 2 folders separating the boards and the dashboards
Releases, Epics & Sprint Boards
I’ve decided to create different boards to manage the different level of scrum increments:
Releases Board
The releases board is used to define the release names, periods and also a link to hold the landing page. If you use a wiki system or Confluence (or any other document management system), you can prepare a landing page to hold all the stake holders roles, useful links for developers & managers to keep your team much more aligned.
Epics Board
The Epics board holds all the epics that are relevant for each release. Each epic has a relevant column which is connected to the release board. This allows you to map each epic to the relevant release. You can group the epics to additional view as your wish, in my example I made different groups for Backend, Frontend and Devops.
I Also added columns to attach links for design documents, test plans and testing results. These can also be filled automatic with various CI/CD automation, depending on you CI/CD platform you are using like the one that is available from Gitlab, Github or Atlassian for example.
Setting a personal Epic leader is also recommend, usually this is developer that holds the end-to-end view of the epic, understand the various stages, technical issues and can be a focal point for the rest of the team members regarding the technical side of the epic lifecycle
Sprints Board
This is the most used board, usually gathers all the team members around it. It holds all the sprints information & stories.
Each user story has an owner, estimation of points, relevant discipline and 2 columns connected to the epics board, to allow mapping of stories to epics. You can also add columns for CI/CD automation to present the code branch and merge request IDs.
Team members must update the status of their story according to their progress.
Another useful tip is to add views to customize and filter according: different teams, disciplines, status, release so you can create handy views for any relevant scrum meeting.
Dashboards
Release Dashboard
This dashboard is mostly used by the stake holders, to be presented in grooming & planning meetings as well. It gives a real time status of the Total release points, planned story points for each epic( and distribution over sprints), progress of each epic and also a gantt to present the projected date of delivery of each epic and to total release
Sprints Dashboard
The sprints dashboard present the team velocity over sprints, as well as the various releases burned points and also the burned points per discipline. This allows you to understand the capacity of the team, based on their actual burned points (helps for future sprint planning and release end time prediction), as well as understand the available capacity for each discipline (useful for budget calculation).
Conclusion
Monday.com is a versatile and powerful project management tool that can be used for a wide range of projects, including software development using scrum. Its flexible interface, customizable boards, and automation features make it easy to adapt to different project management styles. By following the best practices for scrum development and using Monday.com’s features, teams can improve collaboration, productivity, and efficiency. Even though there are dedicated and more advanced tools for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), one can use Monday.com very intuitively and without too much overhead and maintenance.