What is Trello?

Many services allow you to construct an Agile board and share it with a team. These services are for the most part very similar to each other, but may vary slightly in how they are visualized and in functionality. Trello is one of these options and is known for providing users a simple way to create an aesthetically appealing and generally easy to follow board. As you can see in Figure 2, Trello makes it extremely easy to understand what is happening within a sprint.

Fig. 2 A basic Trello board that displays the “Project Team Spirit” sprint.

Figure 3 shows a sample Agile board that we decided to benchmark. We ended up utilizing a Trello board to divide up our own project that is creating this document. With each deadline and grouping of assignments that we had to do, we were able to identify many tasks that could then be assigned to different team members in order to have every member contribute fairly and work towards the common goal of creating a great project together. In this example, the board also contains a “Backlog” - or a list of things that should get done eventually, but aren’t getting done right now. Often, when team members in a group work project finish their own tasks, if they’re feeling like doing more work they can choose certain tasks within the backlog to then complete. Trello nicely organizes sprints and its user interface makes it quite easy to follow. As an additional feature that many other board-creating websites don’t have, Trello allows you to share your board with people that aren’t on the actual project! You can view our board here.

Fig. 3 An Agile board with Backlog, To Do, In Progress and Done columns to track the progress of a sprint.