Tips on setting up Trello for Corrello


Before we start

Corrello does it's best to work with the majority of Trello boards, however Trello is a very flexible tool and there is a lot of variety in how people use it. What we will give you here is a few pointers on how to best set up Trello to get the most out of Corrello. That's not to say this is the right way to set up your Trello boards but it does broadly follow what the majority of teams seem to do.

If you'd like to learn more about how others are setting up their boards you could read Scrum with Trello from InfoQ written based on what we saw from talking to hundreds of teams when originally building Corrello.


Use the same board for each Sprint

Corrello works best if you use the same board overtime for the same teams work. This allows it to best understand the history of the board. It also saves effort on your part modifying dashboards in Corrello each time a new board is created, means your team can open the same board each week to work on and you don't need to worry about copying over incomplete cards from one board to another when a new sprint starts.

Example Sprint board

The sprint board is the board the team opens each day to see what to work on. The simplest sprint board would have just three columns. Here we have a slightly more complicated one showing how you would map the lists into Corrello as backlog (todo), In Progress (Doing) and Completed (Done).

Where to store your backlog?

You can store your backlog on your main Sprint board, or on a separate 'product board'. Corrello allows you to include multiple boards in a single dashboard so it's really down to you and how large your backlog is. Obviously you could opt to store your backlog completely outside of Trello if you wished as well but that limits some of the benefits Corrello can give you such as monitoring the growth of your backlog and your progress towards completing it.

Tracking releases with the release burnup chart

If you would like to track progress towards completion of an upcoming release or project with the release burnup chart in Corrello you should ideally set your Trello boards out something like this.

In this example, if we selected the v2.0 list for our release burnup Corrello would track all cards from that list as being part of the release burnup chart. Cards added to that list would result in the scope increasing, cards moved to the v2.1 list would see the scope drop. Cards taken from that list and completed would be burnt up on the chart.

Where the release burnup chart doesn't work is if you have a list which will never be completed. The lines will never meet and Corrello can't predict when you will be done, because you never will be!

Archiving cards

Corrello treats archived cards differently depending on if they are completed or not. Completed cards still show up as compeleted if you archive them. It is the act of moving the card to the completed list which Corrello cares about, not that it is still in that list now. Cards Archived while in other lists are simply forgotten, it is assumed the card was deleted as it was no longer relevant.

For the most part it is preferable to archive cards and keep them on the same board, rather than move them to another board when you want to archive them. This is because of how Trello truncates the history of a card when it is moved from one board to another which makes it hard for Corrello to understand where it has been. You can still access your archived items from the menu on the right in Trello.

Rename lists? Or create new ones?

Corrello works from the list names in Trello, so if you select a list called 'Done' as your completed list, it will know to use any list with that name in any board included in your dashboard. If you change the name of that list in Trello, Corrello will not know to treat it as a completed list unless you re-select it. This is why we allow you to use a pattern to select the completed lists, as people often like to start a new done list for each week/sprint. For the most part it is best if you can avoid frequently renaming lists in Trello.

Story points and other measures of effort

Corrello can count story points if you include them in the title of the card in ()'s. For example a card called 'Build the widget (3)' would count as 3 points. If you would also like to indicate a separate amount of points consumed after the card is completed but keep the original number you can but that in []'s. Ie a card called 'Build the widget (3)[5]' would be treated as 5 points after it was completed (ie when calculating velocity).