Release announcement

Hi! 👋

Since we released scrumlr.io in 2017 - primarily for ourselves and our retrospective meetings with a distributed team - it was quickly adopted by other project teams within our company and customer teams. Many users liked the simplicity of scrumlr and recommended it on Twitter and other social media platforms. Today we have about 4.000 active users on each business day and we are very happy & proud that so many of you like our approach and support us! Thank you! 🙏

In the last couple of years we listened to your feedback and thought about how we can improve the user experience. At inovex we had the chance to build a development team of highly motivated students and work on a new version. Our main objective was to leave the Google Firebase platform. Though it is awesome and very easy to use many of our mainly german users had concerns about the data security and the GDPR regulation and therefore couldn't use our tool in their businesses.

By that time, our vision of scrumlr has also changed. At first we tried to perfect the retrospective meetings and the flow that was established in our own scrum team. This was the main reason for the "Phases" in scrumlr v1 and some related features. But we understood that each agile team uses its own flow. Some teams like to vote on the issued topics and would also like to prioritise the actions everybody agreed on. Some teams would like to use different modes and column layouts. Almost everybody asked us if we can add a vote limit. 😅

Why we were previously against a vote limit

This decision is heavily influenced by our former scrum master, who is very respected by all of us. He had the opinion that the tool should not technically limit someone from adding additional votes, e.g. if a topic was very important for that person. Also we believe that everyone wants a serious discussion and can trust each other not to troll on purpose. Even now we still like the idea and would keep it that way if it wasn't the first question in each feedback session.

What has changed?

Let's keep it short and raise your excitement to start exploring beta.scrumlr.io. Just keep in mind that things might change more frequently there and you may find some bugs, that we haven't found yet. We will try to keep you informed by our release notes and will not spend time to document those changes in e.g. visitor dialogs.

Our main goal was to add more flexibility and options to use the application on your preferred terms. For example we got rid of the meeting phases and now you can start multiple votings anytime you want. As a moderator you can also add or delete columns and and decide what should be visible to the participants of a session at any time. But, let's stop here. We are very interested in our feedback and whether all of our features will be discovered by you and how intuitive you will find them.

What you probably won't discover (... except you like to study the terms & conditions and privacy policy of each application) is that the new application is hosted in our private cloud located in Frankfurt, Germany. That means that we are 100% GDPR compliant. We also tried to keep our application portable by the choice of the technologies. That means that all components are executed within containers and can be deployed on a Kubernetes cluster, which is probably the industry standard for deployments at the moment. If you have special requirements for our business and you need your own, isolated instance of the tool just send us an email to info@scrumlr.io and we will try to help you.

What are our future plans?

We are doing our best to improve the usability and user experience and know, that not every feature in its current state is perfect! Besides, we are working on making the application more stable and performant.

There are many smaller features we will add and it's hard to sum up all of them. Just take a look on the issues on GitHub. The next larger features will be the option to encrypt all data client-side and the addition of user created board templates and a template gallery. I always joke around and say that we will continue to work on scrumlr until a large coffee shop will ask us whether they can sponsor the "Lean coffee" template. 😆 Maybe someday this joke will turn into reality and help us to keep everything open source while the user base grows. Meanwhile I want once again thank you for your support and hope that we will establish a great, supportive community around our tool. Thank you! ❤️