One of my projects has a problem: while we all try to be in the office for scrum, sometimes we can’t all be. Maybe one person is in the car and can’t talk, maybe another person is on the subway… maybe another person has the day off (but the team needs to know their status).

So I started working on a website to take care of these things, and used this team as guinea pigs. Today I announced this site to the world: Scrum Status

Now we have a centralized place to see the entire team’s statuses, easily. Likewise, it’s easy to make an entry for the day while on the go - scrum status works pretty well on iPhone (even though it hasn’t been specifically tweaked for it).

In the spirit of startup launches I’m launching early, to get feedback. Early testing with my team has ironed out the critical bugs, but now I’m announcing this to the world.

Scrum Status runs on Google App Engine, so I don’t have to worry about scaling issues: 1 person could hit the site, or 5,000 - Google App Engine should be able to handle it.

Interested in technical details? The entire project is open source, and the README has a lot of information about the tech involved: Scrum Status on Bitbucket.