Scrum and Journaling

As Crash mentioned earlier, we have implemented the Scrum process. So far, I’m very pleased at the progress we are making as a team. The first couple of Scrum meetings were a little rocky but we seem to be in a groove now. The burn down chart is healthy and everyone seems to be acclimated to this new process. It’s not too far off from what we were doing before except now we have accountability to our fellow team members to get sh!t done.

One thing I see programmers struggle with is remembering what they did yesterday. This seems like a simple concept. All you have to do is review the burn down chart and you’ll know what you did. Everyone comes to the Scrum with a pad of paper and a bunch of chicken scratch of things they worked on the day before. For the team leads like myself, it is a little more difficult to remember what you did yesterday because we wear so many different hats in addition to our responsibility to Scrum and the sprint.

I won’t write things on paper, ever, so I went looking for a solution that would allow me to quickly jot things down so that I can stay focused on work and would be easy review them prior to the next days Scrum. I came across an application called EVERNOTE, which is a very cool note taking app on steroids.

Remember everything.

Evernote allows you to easily capture information in any environment using whatever device or platform you find most convenient, and makes this information accessible and searchable at any time, from anywhere.

So I can sync my notes/journal on the web, my iPhone, my PC desktop and MAC desktop. Are you kidding me? This is genius! The features are amazing, like text recognition on images for example. Where has this been all my life?

To bring Evernote into my Scrum life I needed it to be a daily journaling utility. Setting Evernote up to be that was simple. I created a notebook called “Journal”. I create a new note each and every day with the date as the title and SCRUM as a tag. That journal note is always open on my machine and syncs often so that I can access my daily journal from other locations, like my iPhone when I’m in a meeting. The next day just before the Scrum, I simply review my journal from the previous day. It’s drop dead simple and I feel comfortable with it because I can access the system from anywhere. The searching engine it bad a$$ which I like because I may want to see all the code-reviews I did at the end of the sprint, or review how many roadblocks I knocked down during the sprint.

If you haven't seen this yet then you have to try it. The best part is the price, FREE!