Many people use a spreadsheet to house their Scrum Product Backlog. That works quite fine. However, during sprint planning meetings it is usually much more effective to use physical index cards. See my book Scrum and XP from the Trenches for the reasoning behind this.
Here’s a simple tool that generates printable index cards in A5 format directly from your Excel-based product backlog. Thanks Stefan Nijenhuis for making this available!
There is nothing to install. This is simply an Excel document containing a product backlog and a “generate index cards” button.
For more info, see the readme inside the document.
This version requires only Microsoft Excel. The previous version required both Excel and Access.
Update (2008-01-04)
Here’s another excel-based index card generator from Claudio Gambetti. Contains a few extra features such as tracks (a.k.a. themes) and components, as mentioned in my book. You choose your flavor. Thanks for contributing this Claudio!
Update (2011-06-23)
Here’s another version from Nathalie Beauguerlange. He says:
“I have made a little modification on it, because the cards were a bit too large for our scrum board, so I’ve resized the template and changed the cards number per page, allowing me to print 4 cards per A4 format page, so that we can use less paper.”
Update (2011-06-28)
Here’s a Google Docs version of this tool (and instruction video), for those who use Google Spreadsheets to house their backlog. I usually prefer Google Spreadsheets over Excel, since it is multiuser and in the cloud. And requires no installation. And no payment :o)
Thanks David Vujic for making this available.
