Smarter Scrum Planner
Scrum is an Agile practice, with simple guidelines compressing a complex array of organizational patterns. Role division where a Scrum Master describes the role that owns the Scrum process, and a Product Owner that is responsible for the Product backlog (i.e., items representing the vision of the product based on expectations of all stakeholders) to maximize business value. A Scrum Board emerged as essential project management tool. The board is a visual representation of project progress, by generally showing tasks either needing to be done, currently in progress, or completed. A team uses the board to track and plan during sprints, allowing members to collaborate and prioritize their tasks, and proves valuable contributions to development lifecycles. For instance, the board provides clarity on when a project is ready to move from development to testing, according to specifications of certain tasks completed. While implementing the Scrum methodology, the board originated in physical form, but may more efficiently be used in digital form. Thus, the Scrum Board as application arose. However, Scrum planning takes a substantial amount of time - which decreases efficiency with strict development timeframes. Additionally, if not done with careful attention, inaccuracies or faults on task planning can occur in Scrum Boards, that continuously increase in size and/or complexity over the course of a development process. Such mistakes can have impactful consequences on the project, e.g., when small issues are actually large bugs, influencing the planning, or when tasks are not clearly assigned to team members and are picked up twice or not at all.
Scrum is a framework for inspecting and adapting to achieve continual improvement by removing impediments. The focus on continual improvement has the potential to significantly enhance performance by increasing throughput, and improvements on aspects of the method implementation can amplify such effects. We aimed to improve the Scrum process by increasing efficiency of Scrum task management. An innovative Scrum Board application that uses an AI algorithm to categorize tasks is developed, reducing the time spent by teams on task management. The application aims to streamline the project management process and improve team productivity. The cloud-based nature of the application offers various benefits, including scalability, reliability, and accessibility from anywhere with an internet connection. Multiple AWS Cloud services are used for the technical implementation to ensure all of the above, including Amazon Comprehend AI-service. Result is an application with potential to result in a highly innovative Scrum Board application with smart, flexible AI task categorization. The application's cloud-based nature and use of AWS services offer several benefits for businesses in need of a reliable and scalable project management tool. The following report provides an in-depth analysis of the base of the project, development process, system architecture, management including challenges faced, the implementation of DevOps practices in our team, and the final outcome and implications of the project.