What electronic scrum/kanban board do you use and recommend for distributed teams?

Question

I have a coworker on a team that is fairly distributed, fairly large (for our company) and wants to take advantage of visual management tools like scrum / kanban boards. Since they are a somewhat distributed team, though, all of the issue management / work management must be done via an electronic tool (we currently use Trac).

What issue / work management tools, with a visualization of a scrum / kanban board, do you use for your distributed scrum / kanban teams? would you recommend it, and if so, why?

Answer 1

Scrumy is very basic, but if you want only a board, then its good enough. There are also Mingle, TargetProcess, VersionOne...

Answer 2

We use ProjectCards, but it really depends on the size of the team. We have close to 50 people distributed globally and we're using ProjectCards for the story management.

Answer 3

I used JIRA which is not really a board but its workflow can match a scrum/kanban flow (Which is what I configured for our organization). We used it as a copy of the physical kanban board, and the user stories and defects were documented and tracked there.

In addition GreenHopper is a plugin that is supposed to provide a full board, burndown, and all you need to manage the full cycle of Scrum over JIRA. It looks very promising, but we didn't get to try it as we were satisfied with our physical board together with the basic JIRA.

I'm also using Scrumy which Marek already mentioned for personal tracking of my tasks. It looks ok so far, not sure the professional version is worth its cost.

Answer 4

We use TFS with the Conchango Scrum for Team System template.

Add in the Conchango Taskboard and you are in scrum heaven!

We all meet online every morning (using Office Communicator) and our Scrum Master shares the taskboard for the standup. We then use it for our in day reporting of progress.

I love it because I can report what I am doing and see what others on my team are doing. All this with very little overhead. I am able to make change and see changes in almost no time flat.

If you can't tell, I am a fan, but that is because I feel that it makes me very productive.

Answer 5

We use agilesita, it works pretty well for planning sprints, generally the product owners are adding in stories and rearranging the baclog in our spirnt planning/backlog grooming meetings. It is fairly limited, IMO in terms of visualizing the progress through a sprint.

Answer 6

We use VersionOne. It does more dann just the Takboard, it's a full featured Scrum-environment.

Answer 7

I have tried and used many tools as task board (Sprint Backlog) for Scrum teams and TBH http://xplanner.org works best comparing to f.e. ScrumWorks, RallyDev or BananaScrum. From product owner point of view RallyDev and ScrumWorks (commercial) gives better functionality for maintaining Product Backlog, but... most often such software is used to update Sprint Backlog (task board) and XPlanner gives You best and simplest functionality in this matter. What is also worth mention - XPlanner is totally free for commercial use.

Answer 8

Let's try ScrumDesk. It covers all Scrum ceremonies and best practices including Planning Poker, Task Board, Treemaps to analyse complex backlogs, team collaboration, reports, etc.

It's always free for up to 5 users, so only additional licenses are charged.

Answer 9

I've been playing around with agilezen. If it's just a board you're after then it's rather nice and supports multiple users and projects.

Answer 10

Currently, I'm using OnTime from axosoft every day !
Take a look at this soft !

Answer 11

I suggest Banana Scrum . As it's said on its website "A tool as simple as Scrum itself". It facilitates cooperation of geographically dispersed teams. It's an online tool so all you need to have is an internet connection. Thanks to live backlog update you can follow changes happening in the very same moment on the other side of the globe.

On their website you can find the complete list of features.

Answer 12

The Story Wall is a very simple free (beta) Scrum tool that allows story tracking at a higher level. Future versions will include a Task Board and Burndown charts.

Answer 13

We just started an open source project for kanban or scrum called Digaboard. The tool first took shape at The Motley Fool (www.fool.com) and started because we couldnt find a tool that could be used during a stand-up and at our desks... everything out there is just overly complicated and we just wanted something to easily visualize our tasks. Check it out and let us know what you think.

Answer 14

@Piotr Uryga Hi,

I am also fan of XPlanner, and developer of XPlanner of next generation: XPlanner-Plus. it's open source, based on XPlanner and has a new and improved features, such as fancy design, email notifications for tasks' status and others. Demo is available.

Answer 15

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.

Answer 16

I like SeeNowDo, which is free, visually attractive and very easy to use. It is a great tool for a Kanban-like Sprint task management. For sprint planning, I use PivotalTracker, which is equally well designed.

Answer 17

We use Pivotal Tracker for user stories, chores and bugs. It lives agile and has a nice dynamic UI. It also comes with the price of free. :)

Answer 18

At Pyxis Technologies we develop Urban Turtle an Agile Project Management plug-in for TFS. Integrated in web access, Urban Turtle give you a web planning board and a task board. Urban Turtle 2010 will works with Conchango, MSF Agile and others templates.

Have a look at Urban Turtle at send me your comments at [email protected]

Thanks !

Answer 19

Hi Derick,
if you already use Trac, the best option you have is to install Agilo for Scrum, it is basically a Trac plugin, that gives you the Scrum tools you need, and has a nice and intuitive Scrum Board :-) http://www.agiloforscrum.org/

Ciao
ANdreaT

Answer 20

Hi John, If you are lazy for investigating all tools with mandatory installation, you can play with Kanban Board of TargetProcess online. http://demo7.tpondemand.com/Project/Planning/Kanban/KanbanBoard.aspx?acid=B54ECDC8A61648730333BCAAD7F4B624

login/pass :admin/admin

Regards,

Anthony