Managing Your Personal Sprints w/ Trello

Your hyper-organized developer is back to share something I've been using since August 2017 that has kept me extremely productive and put-together. 

Background: I work in a team of about 12 people (as part of a larger Engineering Department) and we develop using the Agile Scrum framework. This means there are these meetings:

• Sprint grooming
• Sprint planning
• Sprint retrospective
• Sprint Telecommunications

Okay, maybe not that last one. But lots of ceremonies and such surrounding the framework. The thing that matters most to me is that I know EXACTLY what I need to do and get done in any given sprint so that I can deliver them on-time and on-spec.

We manage our sprints with Jira, which works fine for managing at the team / department level, but for personal use, I find it misses some very key things:

• Easy searching of tickets
• The ability to take personal notes (and, let's be honest, to gripe about 💩)

Enter: Trello.

Here's a Trello template board for you to use!

Main uses:

1. I keep a lot of deployment notes and IDE keyboard shortcuts on this board. I don't deploy every day but when I do, I like having my deployment links and info in one place. Also, I jot down all of my test accounts as well as their respective environments here.
2. Each ticket I have on Jira corresponds with a Trello card. I have a template card ticket that I copy and make for every new ticket in the sprint. It's relatively optimized because I just need to copy+paste the entire ticket number and name from Jira over to Trello. There's also a link to the Jira ticket in the Trello card for when I need to refer back or to update my entire team on progress.
3. I try to kanban it and have only one card in 'doing' state. This helps me stay focused on seeing the task through to its conclusion.
4. I also keep tabs of my merge request (MR) in the Trello card itself. This has helped me a lot in finding code from previous implementations quickly and easily. Feature X that I built in November 2017? Yes, I have the link to the MR so I can quickly recall what specific code was introduced.
5. And I basically use the browser Ctrl + F to search the Trello board all the time. Whenever someone asks what happened with XYZ, it takes me about 5 seconds on my Trello board to give them more info.
6. Most importantly, I can keep private notes on my Trello board / cards. Comments on Jira tickets are 'public' and can get ridiculously confusing for folks when a ticket is in-progress. Do CS, PMs, other devs, and the entire company at-large really need to know the five things I'm investigating right now to fix this problem? Most likely not. I had no other place to note these things and Trello has been such a lifesaver in this regard. And, as a hyper-organized person, being able to put down what I think will be the to-do items in a checklist and marking them as done as I go along? Satisfying AF. ✅

Hope this info and the Trello template board are helpful for you to stay organized!