Agile development; on-line free tools!

Question

We have been looking to implement Agile methodology within our geographically distributed development team, so i need suggestions on any free on-line application that you have used and find useful.

Right now we are using paper cards and wall to manage this :), but we want to shift to an on-line version preferably free.

I have used TargetProcess at my previous job!

My Core requirements are:

• Business Analyst can add user stories
• We can assign, prioritize different user stories to developers.
• QA team can add test cases around different user stories.
• Project Manager can track the time of all the resources and can pull reports for upper management

Answer 1

Timetracking: slimtimer.com. This is one of the best time trackers I've seen (and I've seen many)

Mercurial code hosting: list available here. I've only used the service provided by sourceforge.net and was satisfied with it.

Web conferencing, desktop and whiteboard sharing: Dimdim. I haven't had much luck with it, but I believe it might perform much better on a Windows machine.

All sorts of version control, wiki, RSS feeds: sourceforge.net. It's only for FOSS projects, though, but it really ofers a lot of services.

Other than that, basecamp should fit right in an agile process (although I haven't used it much) with a reasonable price ($50/month...)

Answer 2

I've been using Pivotal Tracker which is a free agile project management tool and covers the following agile concepts:

• Velocity tracking and emergent iterations
• Story-based iterative planning
• Real-time collaboration

Would certainly recommend you try this before paying for an alternative.

Also, as mentioned, Basecamp is a great tool for maintaining documentation, to-do lists and the rest. There is a barely promoted free option for single project use that you will find on the signup page below the Max and Premium options.

Possibly not an agile tool as such (depends on your definition) but the free Team City continuous integration and build server is the kind of software that you don't believe you could live without once you've used it. Basically a commit to SVN by any developer triggers a build to your staging server about 30 seconds later meaning the latest build is very agile!

Answer 3

At work we use a product called Skinnyboard. It has a ton of great features, like:

• Support for Sprints and Product Backlogs
• Sprint tracking via stories/tasks
• Individual task history
• Sprint/Product Backlog burndown, to see projected finish dates, etc.

It's free to try, which gives you (I believe) one board. After that you have to pay though, but it's a great product and definitely worth it.

It's simple, visually appealing, and only has what you need. In my opinion, it's like the Basecamp of SCRUM tools.

Answer 4

They say it better than I ever could,

AgileFant is an open source tool for managing agile software development activities, such as: projects, products, releases, iterations and backlogs. It brings together the perspectives of long-term product and release planning and project portfolio management.

Another one that's recently sparked some interest and seems potentially useful (I'm in beta, easy to get in afaik) is Flowdock which is basically a mish-mash of email alerts, RSS feeds, ticketing systems and plain ol' realtime chat with status messages et al. Think of it as Google Wave that doesn't suck and check out the intro video from the front page.