Poor Man's Scrum Commandline Tools

Once upon a time there was a Scrum Product Owner who wanted to use story cards to communicate even better with his team and his customer. He decided to use Powerpoint as card editor for impressive presentations (with lady decorators) and easy printout. Immitating a template found on the web he put each story in a well-designed layout on a slide. He added one after the other and generated an impressive Product Backlog with a lot of valuable information also for other purposes. The only problem was to access and extract it.

The Product Owner was certified. He was taught that a Scrum Master is responsible for resolving any impedients. The good willing man accepted since he liked scripting. He also liked Python and after some googling he found the library python-pptx to write a few commandline tools:

poorscrum_learn.py

Associates the fields defined in the pickup file with the placeholder indices of the last(!) layout of the slide master of a powerpoint presentation. The layout shall define the content of the story. The pickup file ('poorscrum_pickup.ini' in the '.poorscrum' home directory) is required by the other tools.

poorscrum_export.py

Exports the slides from PPTX file into regular ASCII text files in config format

poorscrum_import.py

Imports the ASCII text files in config format into a PPTX file

poorscrum_burndown.py

Generates a burndown chart from the size fields in the layout if present. Requires the sprint defintion file 'poorscrum_sprint.ini' in the '.poorscrum' home directory.

poorscrum_modify.py

Modifies a single field in a text story after it has been updated in the PPTX file.

Installation

1. Clone poorscrum

   $ git clone https://github.com/r09491/poorscrum.git

2. Enter the cloned directory

   $ cd poorscrum

3. Install the python3 virtualenv with python3 in the clone

   $ virtualenv -p python3 .vpoorscrum

   You may want to add .vpoorscrum to .gitignore

4. Activate the python3 virtualenv

   $ . .vpoorscrum/bin/activate

5. Install the required python libraries

   $ pip install -r requirements.txt

Usage

1. Clone the poorscrum initialisation directory into the home directory

   $ cp -r home/.poorscrum ~/

2. Update ~/.poorscrum/poorscrum_pickup.ini

   $ ./scripts/poorscrum_learn.py ~/.poorscrum/poorscrum_pickupbacklog.pptx 1

3. Test export

   $ ./scripts/poorscrum_export.py tests/hello_pptx.pptx tests/test

4. Test import

   $ ./scripts/poorscrum_import.py --empty tests/test.pptx tests/test/*.story

5. Test burndown

   $ ./poorscrum_burndown.py tests/test.pptx

About python-pptx

The library python-pptx supports to modify an existing slide, to append a new slide to an existing presentation. Especially there is no obvious support to delete a slide, to move a slide, to insert a new slide before or after another slide, to sort the slides as per their content which prevents from changing the slide sequence "en situ". Export and import is needed for this purpose.

About Config Files

The tools use the python standard library configparser to store the slides in ASCII text file in order to edit them conveniently. There are some simple conventions to be followed in order to comment or to make a paragraph. There is plenty of information on the web.

Caveats

The Scrum Masters had access to a shared server

from linux: to run his tools

from windows: to work with Powerpoint

The tools do not work with pptx files from libre office!

The tools is tested under Linux only!

The Scrum Master is not a tester, the tools are not tested.

TODO

• Add a tool for adding burnup charts
• Add additional layout for scrum
• Run under windows