What Project Management software do you recommend for an agile approach?

Question

At the place I am working we are moving to a more agile approach to project management.

For tool support for project management I used MS Project and Target Process in the past. But I think they both have serious weaknesses:

• MS Project is not very intuitive and therefore hard to use especially for novice users. It doesn't really fit the agile approach
• Target Process seems only half done. E.g. users can set their own privileges to admin. Size of user stories is measured in hours instead of a unitless size which I think is really a bad idea. The UI feels bloated and overly complicated not really supporting usage by keyboard only.

We are also using Jira for Issue Tracking and I guess one could modify it and add some custom fields/reports to make it an agile project management tool.

So my question is: What software tools do you use for agile project management and what do you like or dislike about it?

Addition: I am aware that physical tools like a whiteboard or post-its are in a sense the perfect tool but if you want to get an overview about what is going on in the complete company it is kind of cumbersome to run from office to office to look at the whiteboards or to force people to copy it in a different kind of document. A similiar argument applies if you are working in a setting where the customer is not on site.

I'll try to list some features I'd consider interesting:

• easy accessible by management, customer, team potentially from different sites. This almost requires a web app.
• option to configure the app to fit the flavor of agile preferred by the team or company
• it should allow multiple people to access it in parallel. E.g. a developer marking a task/story as done, shouldn't block the customer from adding a new task. This pretty much rules out Excel.
• Nice usability for keyboard only usage, at least for things like updating a lot of stories or adding a lot of stories
• Ability to integrate with Jira (entries there should become tasks or something in the system, changes should get synchronized or at least be impossible if they don't get synchronized) and SVN (commit comments with a story id should appear in the tool)
• Ability to integrate with other systems using a Java API.

Answer 1

Redmine, it is easy to use and contains enough features.

Answer 2

Mostly we use whiteboards and post-its. If we have to use software we usually use Trac or a simple wiki.

It's our experience that using a project management tool actually makes your project less agile. The tool tends to become the focus point of the whole development process and its data more important than the actual software.

I can really recommend using a physical tool instead of a software one. It keep everybody focused in the same location and is much more public and accessible then even the simplest software equivalent.

Answer 3

What specific problems are you facing with your current project management software that you want to address.. What specific flavor of agile are you moving to ? The first bullet is kind of shaky... in that novice users should not really be doing project management. Other arguments read like 'MS Project should not behave like MS Project'

If you want a simplified tool for a product backlog which seems to be what you're looking for.. use a spreadsheet and see if it works out. If not, move to complex ones.

There's a similar thread in SO ... dupe or does this thread deviate significantly ? http://stackoverflow.com/questions/426458/recommendations-for-project-management-software-for-scrum

Answer 4

I recommend checking out Intervals for agile software development. We do agile development at our web development agency and Intervals is quite flexible in bending to our development approach.

Answer 5

My team is using Rally. I also used VersionOne a few years ago, but I think Rally is better. I am not an expert in all features, but I think it does most of the things you need. Don't even try MS project ...

Answer 6

There is value in using a tool to provide visibility into your agile project when it is not pragmatic to come to the team room. I would not recommend using a tool other than the big visible charts in the team room in place of the big visible charts. When a person has to go to a tool to pull the information as opposed to see the information continuously visible in the team room, it looses its effectiveness.

Of the tools we have used my comments are as follows

• Mingle - Programmable and the most customizable, largest learning curve but you won't be boxed into a corner and the learning curve is quickly picked up by a developer
• Rally - Does what you need it to out of the box. Enforces agile practices and has a small learning curve. Reports are good.
• Version One - Swiss army knife of agile tools. Easy, full of features, great query tool to extract project data, need to ensure hosted service provides the performance you need
• XPlanner - free, basic but non-evolving, easy for the team to use, less capable in the reporting department
• Excel - works great, most people start with it and the file can be posted to a WIKI that can be downloaded and viewed by anyone

Consider the licensing. A number of the tools can post results in HTLM which can be read from a WIKI as a dashboard report. If you need to control access to the data then providing a license to the tools or providing a login to the WIKI should meet your needs.

Answer 7

Axosoft's OnTime

Answer 8

I actually use Atlassian's JIRA for all my Agile project management. And with their recent acquisition of GreenHopper, they fully integrated SCRUM into the project management as well. This is only available in the Beta version right now though.

Answer 9

CounterSoft Gemini (at least take their 5 user license for free)

Answer 10

There's a new tool - Bright Green Projects. It allows you to capture and prioritize requirements, build estimates, manage iterations, track issues.. etc. Nice interface and really easy to use: http://www.brightgreenprojects.com

Answer 11

Cam - it's been a year and a half ago as you posted your question: TargetProcess has always had points tracking for user stories, not only hours. There's no points tracking for tasks.