Online Scrum Tools – Part 3 – Import Backlog into Trello
In the previous post about my search for online Scrum tools, I extolled the virtues of Trello and how, for me, it’s the perfect tool to manage a product backlog.
But what if you already have an existing backlog, and don’t want to spend time re-keying the entries? Well luckily, like most things in 2012, there’s an App for that.
Before you get too excited, I should mention that “The App” in this case is a Google Spreadsheet, with a Google Apps Script that leverages the Trello API to import the data. It’s simple, effective, and in true agile fashion, it does just enough to get the job done without unnecessary bells and whistles.
So how does it work? Well make a copy of the spreadsheet in your Google Docs/Drive folder and get to work setting it up.
Go to the “Control” sheet and follow the instructions to set up API keys and tokens. Use the options in the Trello menu in the spreadsheet to find and record the IDs of the board and list that you want to add the cards too.
One of the steps is to add your entries into the “Backlog” sheet, the columns of which are worth looking at a little more closely:
- Upload Status – Set to blank if you want the row to be imported. It is changed by the script as it processes each row.
- Title – The description of the backlog item. This becomes the main text on the generated Trello card.
- User Story – The user story (e.g. As a <user> I want to <doSomething> so that <reasonForDoingIt>) for the backlog item. This gets recorded in the description field on the Trello card.
- Points – The number of story points that have been assigned the story. The script puts this at the start of the title in parentheses. This is how the Trello Scrum Chrome extension handles story points.
- Acceptance – The acceptance criteria for the story. These will be added as a single checklist on the Trello card, with a new line character separating the checklist items.
- Comments – These will be added to the card as comments, with a new line character denoting a new comment.
Once the script runs, and if all goes well, you will end up with a list full of Trello cards that look something like this:
That’s more or less it, easy right? There are, however, a few minor things that are worth noting:
- Google Apps Scripts appear to time out at around 6 minutes, so I changed the import script to end gracefully after 5 1/2 minutes. The stories that have been imported will have “Completed” recorded in column A, so you can just repeatedly run the import script until all entries are imported.
- I did notice that if you had the Trello board open during the import, then some checklists/comments did not immediately appear on the cards – refresh your browser page, and they should appear.
- The Trello cards all have a card number on the bottom right, and it is this unique ID that we use if we don’t want to refer to the story by name.
- The performance seems to vary depending on the number of comments/acceptance criteria, but I was managing to import around 50-70 items in every import.
So there you have it – if you’ve skipped to the end of this post to find the good stuff (i.e. the link to the spreadsheet), then you’re in luck – you’ll find the spreadsheet here.
** Update : I’ve added a new post on how you can now go the other direction and back up your Trello data in a Google Spreadsheet.
Very nice app. Thank you
I like this approach! I got stuck generating the token for B4 and was able to get the token by changing C4 to
= “https://trello.com/1/authorize?key=” & B3 & “&name=Trello+Upload+
Spreadsheet&expiration=never
&response_type=token&scope=read,write”
This includes the key from B3.
Next, I got stuck because I could not find the “Trello menu in this spreadsheet”. I suspect I am missing something really obvious but I could not find a Trello menu. Can you please explain how to find it?
Thanks!
Hi Declan,
I’m not sure why you had to change C4, it seemed to work fine when I tried it – maybe you clicked on it too quickly?
The Trello menu item gets added to the right of the Help menu by the google apps script when the spreadsheet loads – it can take a few seconds, but you can always reload the spreadsheet if it doesn’t show up and see if that helps?
Iain,
Thanks, I figured it out. I initially copied the individual worksheets instead of the the whole spreadsheet. Once, I copied the whole spreadsheet then I see the Trello menu and did not need to make the C4 change.
Thanks!
Declan
Pingback
Great little script, Iain. Thanks a lot—-saved me heaps of time!
Andrew
Glad to hear it Andrew, thanks for the feedback!
The Trello menu does not appear when I open the spreadsheet nor when I copy it. Am I doing something wrong?
Nice. Worked perfectly for me.
Good good – it is quite satisfying watching all the cards being added to Trello as the script runs!
Many thanks … very cool use of a spreadsheet!
Anyway to import the google stories into different lists on the same board as opposed to just importing into one big list? Maybe add a column to the stories to specify which list they go to? Any help would be appreciated!
Hi Earle,
That certainly looks quite easy to implement – if you look at the upload function in the script you’ll see that it gets the listId from the first sheet in the spreadsheet, but it would be easy to pick it up from the last column of the backlog sheet.
How’s your javascript skills?
Excellent. Many thanks. The effort you put into making it easy to use is very much appreciated… so much appreciated that I bought Tooth Camp.
Thanks Gareth, glad to hear you found it so useful, and hope you enjoy Tooth Camp!
Thank you. This is so much useful!
Awesome script, thanks!!!!
Great script. Thanks a lot. Tried it for the first time and it worked like a charm.
Good stuff – glad to hear it’s still working well.
Very nice!! It worked like a charm. Thanks to this post I knew about the “Trello Scrum” Chrome extension where user gives points to the stories.
Now I will search for a good way to export the data from Trello so I can do burndown charts, presentations, etc..
Happy to help.
You might be able to modify the script in this post http://www.littlebluemonkey.com/online-scrum-tools-part-4-trello-backup/ to get the data for burndowns.