Scrumie - a teamwork overview tool

Know what's happening in your team thanks to a simple tool that makes the team management things much easier.

Client

Scrumie.com

Industry

Planning

Services

Web development, Design

Technologies

Django, Djangocms, React, TypeScript, GraphQL, PostgreSQL

8 people

Involved in the project

1 month

To launch the project

25 companies

Registered in 1st day

What's Scrumie?

Scrumie is a team overview tool that makes the team management things much easier. A transparent overview of the teamwork done based on virtual daily stand-ups is the core feature in Scrumie. Thanks to the availability and time zones, teammates can see when their colleagues are working - via their status availability (vacation, home office, sick day…), as well as their working hours. Two integrations - Slack, Github, and two custom apps (Reporting, Accounting) helps further enhance Scrumie’s functionalities (and more is coming soon!).

Why Did We Decide to Build Scrumie?

There were a couple of reasons that led us to develop Scrumie. Since we couldn’t find a suitable tool that would provide us with the features mentioned above, we decided to invest our resources in developing our own software tool. Actually, it wasn’t the only reason. Learn more about them on Scrumie blog.

Our Approach

Initially, we didn’t plan to make Scrumie public. The user interface and the functionalities were meeting just the basic internal needs. However, after introducing the tool to a couple of companies, we realized that Scrumie might help them with team management as well.

Since we saw an opportunity there, we decided to move Scrumie on a much better level and build a proper software tool out of it.

We applied for Web Summit 2019 in Lisbon, where we presented Scrumie as an alpha-startup. It turned out to be a great step because we validated Scrumie’s main idea and gained valuable feedback from our early adopters.

Since then, we are still improving Scrumie, adding new features & integrations and working on the marketing & sales part.

Technologies And a Tough Nut to Crack

For the entire tool development, we decided to rely on our very favourite technologies and frameworks. For the backend part, we chose Django with PostgreSQL database and for front-end React with Typescript that we also use on many clients’ projects. Client-server communication is built with GraphQL middleware: Graphene library on the back-end side and Apollo Client on the front-end. We use CMS Django for managing and writing the blog posts. So far, we have managed to integrate Scrumie with these four commonly used tools:

Github

Slack

Trello (not yet released)

Jira (not yet released)

All of the integrations are using OAuth authentication connecting Scrumie application with Scrumie users' accounts and workspaces. It is still Django under the hood on our side to process such things. Trello, Jira and Slack communication is built on REST, for GitHub we are fetching data via their GraphQL layer directly from the Scrumie client.

Since every service (integration) has differences in the scope of how they work (such as data flow, APIs, main ideas they are following, etc.), it is challenging to cover them under a mutual UI and implementation paradigm.

Ideally, the implementation of integrations should be wrapped up with a common abstraction serializing everything into an output of the single type for scalability purposes. However, we decided to skip this challenging part temporarily to speed up the integration process of the most commonly used tools on the market.

Project Management

On the #1 place are our clients. Therefore we don’t devote Scrumie that much time as we wish to. However, with great people and planning, we’ve made great progress so far. We run 14-day sprints, not only in the development, but also in other parts such as design, marketing and sales. We do our best to interconnect the activities across the multiple areas to make sure that the teams are on the same page. This approach enables us to act agilely and plan further functionalities and steps more efficiently.

So far, we have done a beautiful design, developed two custom apps, released two integrations, added more features and more is coming soon.

Wrapping things up

We’re very glad that we have put so much effort and time into developing Scrumie. We hope that Scrumie will help more companies solve the same problems we had. We’re also very much open to any feedback from your side. If you are interested in trying Scrumie, try our beta version that’s free to use and share any feedback you might have.