We're using Scrum on our current project and we're very happy using our agile board and cards but reporting, burndown charts etc. are somewhat cumbersome to maintain.
So, we're looking for good agile software to use instead. I'm keeping requirements deliberately vague but does anyone have any recommendations?
The software would need to run on Windows.
I'd have a look at TargetProcess, I preferred this to Rally in terms of useability.
For us it turned out that very good tool actually is excel sheet. We have sheet for product backlog and for the sprint backlog. You can very easy create brundown chart for sprints. Also you can find on the web prepared excel sheet templates.
During the sprint it is good to have paper cards representing user stories sticked to the table so everybody have good overview of the sprint status.
My company has been very happy with http://acunote.com. Given estimates from your sprint tasks, it does all the burndown work for you w/nice charts.
Ken Schwaber is a big supporter of the whole 'run your backlog via Excel.' You might also be interested in reading the following articles which provide a good description ScrumWorks and VersionOne in relation to how they benefited a real life project
We spent a fair amount of time with Mingle and Acunote before settling on Pivotal Tracker. Each tool has its pros and cons -- Mingle is deep and powerful but slow and overly configurable, Acunote is excellent for data entry but terrible for viewing and manipulating stories. We still fantasize about writing our own perfect tool someday Real Soon Now, but so far Tracker wins on the features/frustrations spectrum for us. There's a forum for comments and feature requests on Get Satisfaction, but it hasn't seemed active of late.
As a geeky side note, Tim Pope's Pickler provides spiffy command-line integration between Tracker and Cucumber.
Who's maintaining the burndown and the boards ? Why is it becoming cumbersome ? And do you have a dedicated Scrum master ? I would first analyze the root cause of the trouble before to look for tooling.
If ever you opt to go to select a tool, then I'd recommend you to start small, perhaps just with a spreadsheet if you insist on automatic burndown charting (example).
As far as tools are concerned, there range from
online tools such as scrumy, scrumpad and skinnyboard, acunote and BananaScrum
to local applications, either
Of all of this I've only used spreadsheets and Scrumworks. The advantage of Scrumworks is that it's lightweight and does not get in the way. Spreadsheet are of course more customizable.
I liked the look of TargetProcess and went for a trial - but could not get it to run and found their support utterly useless. They just stopped getting back to me after a couple of goes.
It gives you an access to your stories like on physical board. Task board, poker planning, treemaps, grid, backlog management, multiple teams, reports, charts, release end prediction, export to Excel, integration with TFS, etc.
Even many features it is still easy to use (drag&drop concept).
Data fully accessible by MS Office and other applications.
Deployment? Local in your site or hosted on ScrumDesk servers.
The price? 5 users are always for free. Want to know more? Check ScrumDesk page
We worked with Rally for a couple of years but then we got to the point when we couldn't afford it anymore.
So we developed our own tool (agilito). The workflow is a lot like rally, but it's a lot more lightweight. Be warned, it has a lot of rough edges :)
PS: I haven't heard of scrummy 'till now... looks lovely!
If you are a Microsoft shop where devs are using Visual Studio and you have an investment in Visual Studio Team System (a lot of ifs), then take a look at the Agile templates for VSTS. These have pretty solid adoption among teams with an investment in VSTS. Here's a relevant MSDN page
We use JIRA as our bugtracking software and it has this cool plugin called Greenhopper that does it all in JIRA. We also do our specs/requirements via JIRA, but I'm not sure how well that scale if you have a very big project.
I've used Excel, ScrumWorks, XPlanner, and Mingle.
Excel is great, but does not allow for multi-user access. It also does not let you easily create a card metaphor and print "cards" to be used on a physical card wall (which I recommend).
I find that ScrumWorks and XPlanner paint you into a "methodology corner" without the flexibility necessary to adapt (as in the Scrum mantra: "inspect and adapt") to suit your needs.
Mingle outshines the other options by far in my opinion. I can add attributes to cards as necessary, can aggregate properties as appropriate, and can represent hierarchies (e.g. release -> iteration -> story) to make reporting a breeze. Download of Mingle for up to 5 users is free for a trial period.
Scrumy is the easiest one to use. It is a whiteboard with drag and drop post-its for free and a bunch more features in pro which is really low priced ($7)
ScrumWorks I have used and really liked. My hardship with that tool was that if your product involved a large number of backlog items, it soon became hard to stay on top of backlog management. Especially in the area of tracking dependent stories.
What ScrumWorks did really well was make it real easy to stick with Scrum terminology and ideas. For instance the backlog order is based on a ranking that has nothing to do with the attributes like business value or urgency. It allows you to enter those attributes, but allow a product owner to control the order based on their perceived priorities using drag and drop. At the time I used it, a year or so back, it had some valuable reports that showed both the project burndown and the feature creep. Its worth noting that it was possible to publish those real-time reports to URLs that anyone could visit without requiring those people to purchase a license.
ScrumWorks provides a web-based front-end for the team based activities around the Sprint backlog. They also had a Java client that included the full functionality needed to manage the product backlog, themes and general administration.
VersionOne is another tool that provides a primarily web-based interface. The server runs on a Windows paltform. Users at our company generally feel the tool is cluttered with too much functionality, making it hard to navigate. Backlog management works real well with the ability to assign relationships between different VersionOne artifacts (i.e. backlog items, defects, epics, requests). Getting up and running in the tool is a lot harder than ScrumWorks in my opinion, though the user management and administration can be performed by assigned administrators, unlike my earlier experiences with ScrumWorks.
On the reporting side, VersionOne provides a lot of pre-canned reports but only people who have a license are able to see the real time version of those reports. It is possible to generate PDFs or images of the reports to publish a snapshot of project progress, but that is less than ideal.
IMHO, VersionOne is emphatically NOT agile. If anything, it's "big-A Agile", not the preferable "little-a agile". It's your typical enterprisey kitchen-sink web app that tries to be all things to all "Agilistas".
You're better off with something simple like Trac or even a spreadsheet.
Try ScrumEdge. I prefer it to Rally and Scrumworks because of ease of use. Excel would be a close second
My last answer on SO was the same as this one but Hansoft (http://www.hansoft.se/hansoft_php/index.php?id=25) is setup for SCRUM and even custom task completion flows.
We use Scrumpad for our project sprint management. The project has a scrummaster, 3 developers, I (a QA analyst) and 2 business analyst. Previously we used to maintain a task board, and have an excel sheet to monitor the burndown chart. But with scrumpad, you can enter your tasks against stories in a particular sprint, size stories, enter test cases and bugs against stories, track the velocity, burndown for a sprint. It makes it easier since we do not have to manage the cards on the board everyday and also enter time in an excel sheet but just enter time against tasks in scrumpad and it gives you a storyboard view as well just like you would have a board in your office. It gives everyone an overall picture of where everyone is in a sprint.
We, a 50-strong engineering department, use Rally (http://www.rallydev.com/ ). Not bad.
How about iMeta Agility a Scrum Management Tool. It is a rich internet tool written in Silverlight. It is free! iMeta Agility is focused around simplicity and usability. The hosted version is designed to allow collaboration on distributed teams.
Importantly the team that are developing the product are delivering functionality based on community feedback. So you can influence the future development direction.
Many people use SharePoint for team collaboration and getting something working out of the box here is less than ideal.
We created 21Scrum with the aim of being the easy to use, not getting in your way and letting you focus on the project Scrum tool for SharePoint.
We use VisionProject (www.visionproject.se). We are really satisfied and it has a very good implementation for Scrum.
I suggest you to start with Proofhub because in starting we easily build software after that it’s difficult to switch. It really helps you in handling your projects and designs. Its a good project management software you have ever seen.