YouTrack Server
 

Deviate from Classic Scrum

Last modified: 07 February 2025

The YouTrack development team has been following a Scrum framework for several years. For us, Scrum has become a foundation rather than a big strict plan that we have to follow. We’ve found that experimenting with workflows, finding out how to combine different strategies to progress more efficiently, and continuously working on new setups are all keys to improving our daily work life and being agile in our own way.

Over time, we've refined how we work to maximize the activities that work for us, like sprint demos, and eliminated those that don't, like estimations. The agile board that we use to manage our development process is stripped down to use only the features that we need.

Here's what our Scrum board looks like in our YouTrack installation:

Scrum board

This type of board can be useful for teams that follow the Scrum agile framework.

We don’t configure the chart option on this board. Our approach to Scrum includes a few unconventional practices that reduce the effectiveness of the burndown as a reporting tool.

  • We don’t estimate tasks.

  • We continuously add new issues to the board during the sprint.

  • We split issues that were created during the planning into smaller tasks.

Our focus is simply to finish as many user stories as possible before the end of the sprint. To track our progress, all we have to do is look at the number of unresolved swimlanes on the board.